


Dead Air

by Guede



Series: Dead Men Tell No Tales [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - No Werewolves, Amorality, BAMF Lydia Martin, BAMF Stiles, Bondage, Breathplay, Chastity Device, Cock & Ball Torture, Collars, Dark Lydia, Dark Stiles, Dom/sub Undertones, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Grief/Mourning, Impact Play, Incest, M/M, Mind Games, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Overstimulation, Piercings, Rough Sex, Scars, Sensory Deprivation, Sex Toys, Tattoos, Topping from the Bottom, Unhealthy Relationships, Waxing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 20:18:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6298786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where all of Chris’ family are dead, and he’s in love with kinky, sadistic killers for hire Stiles and Lydia, and he still sticks to his guns.  Not his principles, his moral values, or his sanity.  But he sticks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, for the last time: darkfic ahead, please check the warning tags.
> 
> You really need to read _Dead Heat_ and _Dead Reckoning_ first, or the back half of this will not make sense.

Chris shoots himself in France and wakes up in a London hospital.

He’s very lucky, his doctor tells him. Missed the artery by an inch. A fair amount of muscle and nerve damage, but with a couple more surgeries and physical therapy, he should be almost back to where he was.

That’s when Chris starts to laugh. He has a tube up his nose and it hurts, there’s a burn around where the plastic is sticking to his nostril, but he keeps laughing. The doctor looks sharply at him—he’s not tied down, not even guarded—and then strides over to the doorway. Speaks lowly to somebody, and then the nurse comes in and she has a needle and Chris makes himself put his head back. He’s still laughing, he’s rattling the bedframe, but he doesn’t hold anything against her. He knows what he looks like and he knows she’s just doing her job and so he makes sure she doesn’t have to look him in the eye as she shoots him up with sedative.

Where he was. He’s laughing, that’s where he is.

* * *

When Chris wakes up again, he’s sober. His lawyers are there—his family’s lawyers, a couple of them, and as he’s struggling up to sit, one more walks in from the hall. Them showing up makes more sense once all the wills and inheritance laws are laid out, and he realizes how much money they’re after.

He listens. Asks a couple questions, enough to set the teeth of one or two on edge. He’s on drugs and his thigh is killing him, and the world keeps tilting to match the lopsided, glaring haloes around the fluorescent lights, but he’s not stupid. He’s never been stupid. He just…tried to act like it, before.

They get done with the money and then they talk about the investigation. He’s under suspicion, turning up in England with a gunshot wound just a little after his whole family’s been systematically eliminated—

“My father’s still alive,” Chris says. He flexes his fingers and his arms, and then his toes and his knees. The stitches in his thigh send fire up and down his leg, but worse is the numb, stiff, sluggish way that his unused muscles slowly respond to him. “So’s Kate.”

He doesn’t know that for sure—it’s not like he’s checked since he was bleeding out from a self-inflicted gunshot sound—but they don’t correct him and so he knows he’s right. Instead the lawyers look at each other, grave and still with their hands clasped over their plump, ravening bellies, like battlefield crows. Then the oldest one steps forward, and lets Chris know that there’s only been one inquiry, between the pair of them, and that was just to ask about some of the bank accounts.

Chris doesn’t laugh this time. It’s funny, it is, but he doesn’t laugh. He’s done with that. “Well, you’re all still standing, guess it was Gerard who called.”

The lawyers frown disapprovingly, then try to return to the investigation. But Chris has heard enough of that, he’s decided, and he rings for his nurse and then says that he’s tired. And continues to say it, till the room’s been emptied and it’s just him and the machines and a cup of chipped ice the nurse slotted into his hand on the way out.

He takes a deep breath. He hurts. He doesn’t care that Gerard and Kate haven’t asked after _him_. He wouldn’t even care that they’re asking after the money, except that he’s going to need that now, every cent of it, and…and he’ll have to do something about that. He needs to get the investigators off him too, and he needs to get out of this room.

The nurse comes back in. “Can I have a phone?” Chris asks her softly.

His skin’s got that grayish cast to it, which comes from being washed over with a sponge, and the stubble on his face is unevenly shaved. He hasn’t been in here long enough to show any weight loss, but the flimsy gown he wears crisps up around his joints and floats down his front, making him look smaller than he is. He hunches his shoulders, lowers his head and helps that along.

She looks at him. She’s not the same one who sedated him before. Her hands rise on instinct, palms up, fingers open, ready to help, but she senses something awry. Her lips thin and she looks him over, and then she looks over her shoulder. Someone’s having a conversation in the hallway a few yards down, but they’re not within eyesight.

Chris tilts his head, keeping it down but looking more closely at her. “Something wrong with that?”

Her lips go white, she’s pressing them so hard. Then, quick and smooth as any pickpocket, she slips a phone from her pocket and then slots it under the sheets, into his hand. “Look, this, it got left for you, if you asked for it,” she says. “I’m off shift now. I don’t want to know—don’t tell me. I don’t even want the money, it’s just—”

“It’s just whatever you’re going to spend it on,” he tells her. “Just don’t think about it. You’ll get rid of it fast enough.”

She steps back from him, wiping the hand that’d held the phone against her hip, and then she jerks herself out the door and down the hall. The people talking call out to her, ask her something, and her voice rises sharply before it cuts off.

He’s not paying attention to her, just tracking by ear, the way he was taught. He slides out the phone and looks at it: burner, no pre-programmed numbers in it. No messages. Full battery. He doesn’t know what phone plan it has, but it doesn’t balk when he punches in a Swiss country code. Calling the number he was taught.

His family taught him a lot of things. He’s forgotten some, let other things go to rust and dust, but he still has what he needs. More will come back as he uses it, and the rest, he knows he can learn. That’s the thing. He never thought he wasn’t _meant_ for his family’s business. He just didn’t want it.

He still doesn’t want it, but he knows he needs it. Somewhere between that horrifying second, bodies of his family all around, a burn on his arm from the smoking muzzle that’d killed half of them and a bullet through his leg, when he was greying out from blood loss and watching them leave. Watching their feet, that’d been all he could see, the ratty sneakers and the peach heels and the dark wet smears on the soles whenever they took a step—

Somewhere between that, and the doctor telling him where he was, Chris figured it out. So he needs to make a few calls.

* * *

He doesn’t get out and about right away. His leg’s a mess, and he needs it to work so he needs those surgeries. But once the finances are in order, the rest falls into place: he has himself moved to a private clinic, somewhere he can take visitors that the authorities won’t hear about, and he hires a couple bodyguards for himself. Gets a gun. Shoots one bodyguard, to point out he knew about the money the man was taking from an old rival smuggling ring, and tells the remaining one to find a few buddies to fill the opening.

The clinic doesn’t seem that unhappy to have the body, which is about in line with why Chris chose it. He tells them, none of it in his leg, but otherwise he doesn’t care what happens to it. Then he has his second surgery, and when he wakes up from it, he starts giving the lawyers things to do. Makes a couple more calls to Switzerland, and one to France.

He’s waiting on the French one when the nurse informs him that he has visitors. Chris looks up at her and she’s already gone, fleeing down the hall as Stiles flops into the chair and Lydia leans against the jamb. His guards are nowhere in sight, and they’ve brought him paperwork.

Stiles fans out the sheets and offers them like a bouquet, even raising them under Chris’ nose so he can smell the faint smudgy ink before laying them across Chris’ lap. “So you can get the story straight on your end,” he says.

He’s different. Baggy clothes, bad haircut, that’s all the same but it was a uniform, then camouflage, and now it’s just window dressing. It could be paper cutouts for all that it means; what Chris sees, what anybody with any sense sees, is the way the body under it holds itself, coiled predator and casual about it, lived-in. He slouches not because he’s bored but because he _knows_ he’ll get up first, get to the gun first, get in and out of your gut before you’ve even seen his knife.

Lydia’s not the same, and not like him either. Chris doesn’t know much women’s fashion, but he knows image, and before she was dressing the trends, and now she’s dressing to class out the rest. She doesn’t attract attention; attention gives itself to her, and then bleeds red as she flicks out her leg, pushes off the door and clicks across to Chris’ bed.

Neither of them are faking anymore. He’s not so sure now, looking at them again, that they were completely playing pretend with him, but it doesn’t matter because they’re making it clear they’ve ditched any play. It’s in the way they size him up. How Stiles leans over in his chair as Lydia reaches across the bed, and lifts one of the papers. They mean it now.

“Read them,” she says. “Try not to miss anything, would you? We spent a lot of time on it.”

“Longer than planned. Even stayed a little longer in France,” Stiles says. He fidgets with his cuff. He has something taped up his sleeve, and he’s letting Chris see it. “Wouldn’t have minded so much, I guess, if your family had based itself somewhere with something to do. And I thought we came from Nowheresville.”

Chris looks at the papers. Most of them are news articles. Obituaries, homicide items. Near the bottom of the stack he pulls out a two-page internal report from Interpol. He reads the synopsis at the top, and it’s theorizing that his family was wiped out in a territorial struggle with Russia-based gangs, or perhaps South American. He reads another sentence and then looks up.

Lydia smiles at him, and puts two fingers under his chin, and then, as he sucks in his breath, she flips them and presses their tips just below his lower lip, forcing him to look down. “We brought paper so we can take it out with us,” she says. “You get to read just once, so you’d better pay attention to the details.”

He reads. They wait for him. Stiles pulls out his phone, while Lydia moves the rails around Chris’ bed so that she can perch at the end, her body heat just filtering through the blankets to his feet. Once Stiles takes out a bottle of water and hands it to Lydia, who wipes the lipstick from the rim and then uses her phone to check her mouth as she touches that up. 

He’s not sure if they’re expecting questions. He can’t come up with any, anyway. His head starts to ache only two sheets in, and then the backs of his eyes join in, throbbing spikes of pain deeper and deeper into the center of his skull. Quotes chase each other, merge and then, when he tries to pin them down, squirm free to disappear into the abyss. He starts to flip back to verify, but he sees movement from the corner of his eye and it’s Stiles and he doesn’t even look to see what or why. He smooths the page down and keeps reading.

“Done?” Stiles says, after Chris turns over the last sheet. 

He gets up, shuffling the papers together, and the backs of his hands brush across the thin sheets, the lousy tissue gown that even this clinic insists on, and it reminds Chris of how he’d catch Stiles flipping to the ends of books, then going back to the beginning.

“Are you _still_ insisting on what you said?” Lydia says, looking at him.

Chris shrugs. He knows she’s looking at him in disgust and confusion, and so he doesn’t flinch when she huffs and pivots on her heel, stalking to the door. She leans out, calling to somebody. A lunch order, for one.

Stiles is still by the bed, cradling the papers in his hands. The sheets twitch, and then he makes them disappear. He puts his hand down at the same time, next to Chris’ leg, the one with the healing gunshot wound, and then he ducks to peer right into Chris’ eyes. When Chris tilts his head to make it easier on him, Stiles smiles and then shakes his head.

“I don’t get it,” he says, the way that you’d address an elderly relative who keeps up a silly habit out of habit. “You know now. Right? You know. You know—”

“You told me,” Chris says. He takes a deep breath. Rubs his hands together. He notices that they’re shaking like they don’t belong to him, like they’re somebody else’s hands. “You told me. We’re going to visit Marthe. We’ll say hello to Thierry. We’ll—”

“Told you we’d take care of everybody who might come after us,” Stiles says. He’s not smiling anymore. He’s a little young, a little new at this, he doesn’t need to harden his voice but he does. But he’s quick and he doesn’t need Chris to teach him that all he needs is that cool, steady stare, and Chris fully expects that next time, Stiles won’t bother with the words. “You gonna come after us, Chris? I don’t think so, not after that shit you pulled, but…but I don’t know what that was either.”

Lydia turns back from the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. She walks back to the bed, stiff and stern, and then she goes willowy as she bends, breathes over him, makes him smell her. She’s floral but not too sweet, not heavy, just a fresh light breath of something too good for him. “You should promise,” she says. “Give us your word.”

And Chris, he finally thinks of something to ask. “Is _that_ why you came by?” he says, and he thinks he hears laughter in the way his voice rattles. “That all?”

Stiles abruptly pushes himself away. Scuffs his foot against the ground, snorting, and then he rubs at the back of his head, strangely delinquent. Harmless till he glances back over his shoulder. “You think you crawled to London on your own? You’re not that much of a martyr, Chris.”

And Chris flinches, and he can’t just see the expectation in them, he’s breathing it, practically choking on it. But he digs his fingers into the sheets, and into his thighs beneath; his stitches strain and it hurts and he barely understands what that means anymore.

He doesn’t ask what they think he will. Just shakes his head, strangles whatever’s trying to vibrate out of his chest. He doesn’t need to laugh now.

“I’m not coming after you,” he says. If they want him to say it, he can do that. “Got my word on it.”

They look at him for a little longer, Lydia bending over him, arms still crossed, breasts nearly grazing his temple. Stiles positioned a few feet away, side-on to Chris except for his head. And then Stiles swings around and walks out, and Lydia follows him, and Chris is alone again.

He wants, suddenly, to tear out the stitches in his leg. More than that, he thinks about gouging the hole broader and deeper, ruining all the work that the surgeons have done. Making it big enough to fit his hand, just jam that all the way in and make it fit all the people and things that he’s buried over the years. Because dirt doesn’t seem to have kept them down, so maybe his own flesh will. God knows it hasn’t been good for much else.

But even as he’s thinking it, he knows he won’t do it. Knows he won’t even try. Some people talk about when they were dying, they see things, like tunnels of light and warm faces, and modern medicine says that that’s just the cells in the eye misfiring as they go out, one by one. Well, he didn’t see heaven when he was lying there in the middle of the family estate, and he doesn’t see it now. He’s closer to dying than he was back then, and if he’s all wrong and these are just the last couple lights going out, well…

He was in the dark for a long, long time before that, Chris thinks. He’s used to it, and now he’s just facing up it.

Chris gets his phone out, and makes a few more calls. And he asks for a laptop. They’re right, he’s running behind. He needs to do better.


	2. Chapter 2

Physical therapy starts after the second surgery, pauses for the third, and then picks up in earnest. His therapist is patient but impersonal, which is fine because Chris has enough dedication on his own, and doesn’t need a coach to know that he’ll land himself more surgeries if he overtaxes his leg. He’s not pushing himself just for his pride, doesn’t have that kind of blindness anymore. He just does what he needs to get his leg to work.

Chris heals fast for his age. His excellent physical condition is a factor, the doctors say. He seems to have a good mental approach as well, his therapist dares to add.

He sends them all out of his room and he sits there on his bed, his legs over the edge and one hand on his gunshot thigh. They’ve swapped out the tissue gown for loose cotton pants; there’s a matching shirt but he took it off early in the therapy session, and so the cool flick of the air-conditioner slides down his bare back, coming from the ceiling vent right down between his shoulderblades. He’s sore enough that he thinks he’ll stiffen up in the morning—he can already feel it, how his hamstrings are overtensioned and aching. He should call for the masseuse, or take the pain meds, or probably both.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Stiles says from the door. “Or maybe a family secret? ‘cause I gotta admit, I’m wondering what the hell they raise you guys on in that part of France. You look better after a bullet than you did when we brought your—”

Chris grips the edge of the bed. He has mattress and metal rods folded into his hands, and the mattress crushes like cardboard and the rods clink under the pressure. “Please don’t mention her.”

Footsteps come into the room, scuff lightly at the far side of the bed, and then come around. Stiles still isn’t within eyesight, unless Chris wants to turn his head, and Chris didn’t hear the door shut. He does hear a low conversation somewhere in the hall, but that ends a second before Stiles laughs.

“Well, why not? Is she fucking Saint Allison now?” Stiles says. His voice is sharp enough to make Chris flinch, light as his laughter was. “She wasn’t, Chris. She was my friend but she wasn’t a saint and that makes her a hell of a lot better than you with your fucking Christ act.”

“You—” Chris takes a breath, as the bed sinks beside him, and it’s ragged and his feet jerk back under the bed, but he doesn’t look over “—look, you already told me about her. What’s the point?”

Stiles isn’t sitting. The bed doesn’t sink enough for that. He’s got his hand out, leaning over, blowing his acid words at Chris’ ear. “Maybe we didn’t tell you everything.”

Chris feels the depression in the mattress move closer to him and he shuts his eyes. “Why would you?”

“Maybe,” Stiles says, with the kind of care you’d take to set eggshells on eggshells. “Maybe it was a test, seeing what you’d do with what we told you before we gave you the rest. Maybe we were seeing if she was the only goddamn one of you with any balls.”

“I shot people for you,” Chris breathes out. He feels his head drop and it’s disorienting for a second because his eyes are closed, so it’s like he’s freefalling. One of his feet slaps down on the floor before he can help it and he grimaces but he doesn’t open his eyes. And he makes himself say her name, even if it sits like battery acid on his tongue. “Didn’t just do that, I talked them into coming for it. And I didn’t do that because I thought it’d earn me more stories about Allison.”

“No, you did it for me. For Lyds. Yeah, you did that,” Stiles says. He rocks back, and his voice pulls in its claws too, turns musing. “Yeah. Okay. So what does that tell us?”

Pains are shooting up and down Chris’ arms, because he’s gripping the bed so tight. He makes his hands open, and then wills his fingers to relax out of their rigid curl. The pains don’t go away so much as thin out, spreading like softened butter does when put on a hot stove. They go up his shoulders and down into his back, digging deep into the muscles, like each one’s getting a sheath of dull ache.

He opens his eyes, and then turns his head and looks at Stiles. “That I failed,” he says honestly. “That you’re right, that she was the only one of us worth it.”

“And your father had her killed,” Stiles says. He’s still calm. He’s so calm now, calm and still and unnerving without his fussing, his fidgets, his nervous tics that are—were—just so much useless ornamentation. He looks Chris in the eye, one finger raising and tapping once at the bed. “She was our friend. Still used her to get to you.”

Chris smiles. “She was already dead, Stiles. She doesn’t care anymore.”

Stiles stays still. He doesn’t blink. He stares at Chris, not a twitch in his eyelids to block that twist in his eyes. Chris hasn’t frightened him, hasn’t even worried him. Even if it’d all been an act, Chris still has seen how Stiles makes himself look for those emotions and what Stiles looks like now isn’t even close.

“We figured you were pretty much dead too, you know, first time we saw you. Not when we met.” Stiles pushes off the bed, flipping that hand dismissively. He swings himself around the edge of the mattress like an almost-teenage boy in oversize flannel, all jerk and flap, and then he’s got a pair of handcuffs held out in his hands, like he’s giving Chris a present. “When we saw you, before that. Scoping you out.”

Chris looks at the cuffs, and then up at Stiles. Who smiles at him, chin tucked a little towards his chest, shoulders tipped, bashful in the pose and then cool study in the eyes.

“You didn’t even have to do that,” Chris finally says. “You just talked me into—”

“Yeah, well, I was think—do you want me to talk to you again?” Stiles says. He pauses, leans back, and then he’s—different. He’s nervous, he’s shifting on his feet, one corner of his bottom lip sucked under his teeth. He looks nervous, brows jumping over his eyes. “I mean, I don’t know, Chris, I hear what you’re telling me but it just seems like a—”

It just—nausea is sudden and unexpected, a rogue wave on a moonless night. It’s like Stiles punched him in the kidney with the memory.

Chris recoils. His knees come up a few inches, his hands go back and then slide on the sheets, and he gags a little, tasting something foul and burning in his mouth that’s even worse than his daughter’s name. He looks away, then back and by then Stiles already has slipped that skin like so much crumbling paper, has darted forward and seized one of his arms. Yanked him around, dropping him half on his hip, half on his belly, rolling his weight to his injured leg and the pain of that forces Chris’ mouth open in a harsh gasp. He almost doesn’t feel the cuffs going around his wrists.

“You’re already looking better,” Stiles snorts. He shoves Chris’ bound wrists a little up Chris’ buttocks, then flips Chris around onto his back, dropping to his elbows on the bed, straddling Chris’ hips. Looks Chris over again. “Gonna have to tell Lydia, good guess.”

He drags the pants down to Chris’ knees and then puts his hands between Chris’ legs, curling them up under each thigh. Lifts them so Chris’ head goes back and Chris is staring at the ceiling, at the black-speckled white tiles that always seem to be around the sick and dying. The cuffs are too tight, he can feel his wrists bruising, and Stiles is gripping too close to the gunshot wound. The stitches will tear. It all hurts.

But Stiles is right. The acid taste in his mouth is gone, and maybe that’s because Chris has his mouth wide open, rasping the air over his tongue hard enough to make that burn, but it’s a better burn, a cold clean one that doesn’t linger. He won’t have to sit with it afterward, when he’s by himself again with his hired men and his hired medical staff and all the other things he’s paying for now.

Stiles bends over him, puffs at the head of his cock. It’s a hot, clinging breath, shocking against the chilly room, and Chris twists up and puts his cock into Stiles’ mouth. Not so hot then, he’s already getting used to it, but Stiles doesn’t gag, doesn’t even pause, just slides Chris straight into his throat in one suck. Makes Chris twist again, crying out in the middle of a sucked breath and turning that to a choke, humming thoughtfully as his hand releases Chris’ thigh, comes up instead to toy at Chris’ balls.

He tugs them out as his tongue teases at the frenulum, digging into the muscle, twitching the head of Chris’ cock against the unyielding roof of his mouth. Then lets them tighten up towards Chris’ body as he shifts further over, tilting himself till his hair’s brushing at Chris’ belly. Chris is groaning, yanking at the cuffs, and every time he moves his belly compresses against the top of Stiles’ head and drives the breath out of him.

Lightheaded, seeing spots, Chris slumps back and Stiles moves down too, pulling off Chris’ cock till he just has the head of it in his mouth. The air wraps around the rest of Chris’ cock, freezing it, like a sheath of ice and he hisses and jerks his hips but Stiles moves exactly the same amount, keeping just what he wants of Chris between his lips. He lets Chris feel his teeth, just the pressure of them caught behind the head, and then his thumb slides across the bandage on Chris’ thigh and the bright hot spark of pain under it blossoms into a climax that rips Chris up through the belly and comes out in a long, dying cry.

Stiles nurses the come from his cock, then withdraws. He wipes his mouth with one hand, keeps a loose grip on Chris’ leg with the other, so when Chris writhes, it turns Chris onto his side. “You know, also, I think you like my blowjobs better now,” Stiles says, amused.

Chris flinches and tries to draw his legs up onto the bed. Stiles holds back the one, just for a second, and then releases it. He leans over and uncuffs Chris, pausing to touch one bruised wrist, and then he snorts and shakes his head.

“Huh, and you didn’t say a thing. Could get nerve damage, you know, if you use these wrong,” Stiles says, tucking away the cuffs. He wipes at his mouth again, then grabs a tissue from the bedside table and cleans off his hand. “Your dad taught me that one.”

“Shit,” Chris mutters into the bed. He isn’t answering Stiles; he’s just responding to the way the man’s looking at him.

Stiles looks at him, a little sharply, and then grimaces. “Well, gonna have to tell Lyds it wasn’t _that_ helpful.”

“Why would you,” Chris starts, and then he swears and jerks his head off the bed as Stiles moves away. His pants slide to his ankles, then fall off as he kicks at them and drags himself over the bed after the man. “No, wait, please—”

“So here’s the thing,” Stiles says. He doesn’t pause but he moves slower, turning and walking sideways to the door. His eyes are bright, he’s interested, but they’re cold too, the same way light reflected off the snow has no heat. “The whole fucking you thing, Chris? We didn’t have to do that. Not that you’re bad looking or anything, but Lyds and me can find our own fun. It’s just well, you _wanted_ to, so we figured we might as well. But you asked for that. We didn’t think of it before that.”

This noise crams up in Chris’ mouth, till he can’t keep it in and then it spills out in hurtful dribbles, small and low and so, so desperate. “I didn’t know, it doesn’t matter, just, _please_ —”

“Just, really, were you that lonely?” Stiles says. And he’s _interested_. He doesn’t know the answer to that question—Chris has never seen that look on his face before, but Chris knows that’s what it is, the way that mice who’ve never been outside know what a shadow floating overhead means. “You’d settle for a couple kids?”

“No,” Chris says, and Stiles stops at the door and Chris’ chest feels like his ribs are an iron vise and his heart is a knot of pain trapped in it. “No. Not just that. It was never settling, Stiles, it was—I was—I saw you coming. Maybe I didn’t know the whole plan, but I saw you and—and you looked—you and Lydia, I just—I wanted to wait for you.”

Stiles stares at him for a few seconds. He’s still and silent, that cold face a shutter now, turning back everything while not letting a whisper from inside escape.

Then he’s angry. “I don’t even know what to do with that,” he says, and he turns on his heel and leaves.

He doesn’t close the door—the door’s been open the whole time. Chris could walk, could _crawl_ , but he doesn’t and it’s not because he’s too proud. 

It’s not because Chris has given up either. It’s just, Stiles has left, and that is that. He can’t stop them. He won’t stop them. He can’t look there anymore.

Chris rolls over and presses his face into the bed. He’s still gasping but the sheets suffocate him till he stops, and then he turns his head to the side. His throat and lungs are burning but it’s starting to fade, to just ache.

It hurts, watching them leave. But he did it before, and he still woke up afterwards. He hates himself for that, in those moments right as they’re walking away from him, but he did it. He does it. He’ll keep doing it, as long as they come back. And now he looks to that.

* * *

When Chris isn’t in therapy, he’s catching up. The lawyers are working on the probate proceedings and the criminal investigations, and it’s going well enough that he can put a hold on the Swiss bankers for the time being. He puts that time towards arranging a meeting with certain high officials in the French justice system to speak frankly. His family’s gone but he knows the business isn’t gone, and he knows it’s not going well. Stiles and Lydia almost didn’t need to come up with a cover story, the way that other groups have been moving in, fighting it out, getting civilians killed.

France is different from the U.S. Chris has lived there for years, at this point, but he’s never pretended to live in it—one more difference between him and the rest of his family. He doesn’t try now either, knows better than to act like he’s not. Besides, he has the memory his family’s carved, bribe by bribe, blood by blood, death by death, into certain parts of France, certain levels of its society and government, and that alone is better than a perfect Parisian accent or a little je ne sais quoi. The money just makes it easier to close eyes, and his reasonableness, a way to help people sleep at night. 

He doesn’t intend to be a mere curator, doing things as they’ve been done for time immemorial, just because that’s how his family did it, he tells them. He’ll be a businessman. He’ll be modern. He’ll be useful.

He’s alone, he says. End of his line, and he knows that they know he went and had the surgery to make sure he’d never have more children. His lifetime only, which will only be as long as they think is necessary, and that will give them time to prepare and be ready for a smooth change of power, when that comes up again. That’s what they’re thinking. They may be right—he doubts it; buying time just means they can leave it for their own successors—but it doesn’t matter much to him anyway. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife. When he’s dead, he’s dead.

Chris moves out of the clinic and into a London townhouse, one of his family’s properties that he inherited. It’s old and when they’d bought it, it’d been in the right part of town but now it’s not. The area’s trendy, it’s too noticeable, and he plans to stay there only as long as it takes him to get back to France.

Lydia comes calling on his first night there. He’s had the security redone and he used only people who’d benefit from seeing an Argent back in power. Made personal visits to check on the work. And now that it’s done, he’s up late, alone, with just his gun and his temporary cane to look it over again.

She doesn’t sneak in. She comes to the front door and asks to be buzzed in, and when he opens the door, she walks past him and frowns at the dust ruining the shiny finish of her shoes and then puts a bag on the kitchen table. “Let’s have dinner,” she says. “I want to know what you’re doing.”

Chris doesn’t mistake _what_ for _how_. They sit down and he tells her about his discussions, the legal maneuvers his lawyers are employing. She asks some questions and he answers them, as straightforwardly and concisely as he can. Then he moves on to what he’s doing in France. He can’t go over there himself yet, but now that he’s mobile, he can vet for more than just bodyguarding. And some of the people his family used, they’re not dead yet.

She doesn’t ask so many questions about that part, but she listens even more closely, her eyes wide and hungry, past mere curiosity. Even when he was acting, Stiles never tried to hide how much he wanted to know, and he seemed to devour information like he needed it more than air. But Lydia listens and she’s poised and motionless and what comes out of him sinks into her, constant and endless and effortless, like light into a black hole.

Some of these people he’s used, they’re not family, but they’re tied just as tight to the Argent name. He pauses for a moment, and Lydia smiles. “Wondering if we’ll ask you to kill a few more?” she guesses.

“Do you want me to?” he says.

Her smile leaves, slow but inexorable. She puts her arm up on the table and rests her head on her hand, letting it tilt a little. She’s beautiful, under the unforgiving bare fluorescent bulb, take-out containers scattered in front of her and construction dust marring her sleek clothes, and from where he sits she could be his new wife, dragged into his mess and yet rising out of it shining.

He tastes a little bile in his throat and Lydia changes again, without changing her pose. She’s harder, sharper, the dirt on her no longer charming but foolish, as if it could ever really touch her. “I told Stiles back then,” she says suddenly, strangely irritated. “I told him we were taking too much time with you. You already caved, so it’s not like we needed to keep stringing you along.”

“But you wanted to,” he says. He’s not sure why; he hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about them before. Doesn’t want to—doesn’t _need_ to. Before is dead, that’s been made clear, and what’s dead is dead.

Lydia straightens up. She pauses, then takes her arm off the table and folds her hands in her lap. Somehow it makes him feel as if she’s taking from him, not just withdrawing, and panic abruptly surges through him.

Chris shoves his chair back. He sees her hands move and tighten and he doesn’t know what they might be hiding, but he’s already down on his knees in front of her. He doesn’t touch her but he looks at her, at her tightened lips and her carefully blank eyes.

“Please,” he says. His leg is screaming at him, and when he ignores it, the half-reconstructed muscles start to spasm, sending it out from under him in a kick that bruises his shin against the table leg. “Please. Don’t leave. Please. I’ll—”

“Shoot yourself again?” Lydia snaps. She pushes back, almost rising, and then she sighs. Slouches back, her hands curling around the side of her seat, shoulders pushed almost ruefully up towards her ears. She looks like a girl for a moment, not like the glossy idol she’s dressed as. “We got too clever, giving you a gun with one bullet, I’ll say that. Too much like a movie, or a book, stupid of us. We’re not actors, Chris, whatever we showed you.”

He’s only half-listening to her, though that half is as feverish as the half that’s still rocking on the floor, clawing his fingers into it and trying to not let the sob in his throat break out. It’s too feverish to interrupt him as he rambles on with his pleas. “Please. Please. I can’t do this, not if you leave,” he says.

That’s wrong. He knows that and he would cut his tongue out for it, if he hadn’t already said it. And she knows that too, and she relaxes. Lydia draws herself up, lets go of her chair and reseats herself, her hands folded over one pale knee slipping out of her skirt. 

“Actually, it looks like you do better when we leave you to it,” she says, with a glance right, then one left, and then her eyes come back to him. She smiles again and this smile is simple. It’s meant to gut and nothing else. “Is that why you’re doing it, Chris? Trying to show us something?”

“Please,” is all he says. All he can say, all he knows to say. “Please.”

She looks at him a little longer, her amusement and even her malice fading. Her shoulders shift, close to slouching again, and then she gets up from her seat. “Show me the rest of the place,” she orders.

Chris takes her into the basement where he has a barebones office, with a desk and a laptop and cases of weapons. There are bedrooms upstairs but he doesn’t use them. He can’t get up the neighboring buildings and check the sightlines with his leg, and he trusts his guards to kill for him, but not to think for him. So there’s a bed in the corner of the office where he sleeps.

His leg aches. He sits down on the bed, and Lydia takes his cane from him. It’s cheap wood, nothing special. Balanced badly; he sees her frown as she toys with it, letting the middle swing from her fingers as she walks around the room. She mostly ignores the guns, looks at the knives, but only really shows any interest when she comes upon the spare cameras he’s been rewiring.

“Stiles and I are leaving in a few days,” she says, pivoting sharply about to face him. The end of the cane cracks against the floor. She leans on it and doesn’t blink. “We’re working. We took a break to deal with you and your family.”

“Yeah, I figured.” That comes out awkwardly and she tilts her head and Chris grimaces. “After. I knew you two were…but after, I looked you up.”

“Not before that?” Lydia says, her brows rising. She takes a step past the cane, then moves her other foot so they’re both in front of it, and the crook is pushing deep into her skirt, a teasing question mark nestling into the outlined vee of her thighs and groin. “We went through a lot of trouble in case you did. We checked you out, you were paranoid enough to—”

This time Chris doesn’t care whether he’s awkward or not. “Yeah, well, I heard about Allison and I just…stopped that. And—and nobody came anyway. Not till you two.”

Lydia smiles at him. Pulling herself up against the cane, a long stretch that rustles her skirt against the thin pale wood, lifting the hem, sinking the folds back between her legs. And then they flick out, stiff and starched, as she swings the cane out of the way.

She comes over to him, still smiling, head a little down, lips curved and coy, and bends so that the soft drape of her blouse falls out in front, showing creamy breast tops. The cane rises, crook almost hooking at that offering neckline, and then she tips it to press against his chest. “Feel left out?” she asks. “That’s not the same as lonely, you know. Stiles and I had plenty of people before your father decided it wasn’t good enough to just go after the cops looking into him, and he had to go after everybody around them.”

“I know,” Chris says. He leans into the cane. It doesn’t give, Lydia’s arm doesn’t even shake, and the spot on his chest where it presses is starting to hurt. “I know. You’ve told me.”

“Everything we told you about your family was true,” Lydia says, unblinking. Her wide calm eyes are unsettling; they remind Chris of an animal’s eyes, because they’re alive and they feel but what the feeling in them is doesn’t quite translate. “Everything about your father, about Allison…even about all the ones we’ve killed. You’ve killed.”

“I know,” Chris says. He takes a deep breath and the cane skates down his breastbone, pressure unchanging so it leaves an aching groove in its wake. “I know my family, Lydia. Better than you. I didn’t need you to tell me what they did to know they let my father happen.”

Her smile widens a little, showing a hint of pearled teeth. Then she moves her head and a loop of hair slides off her shoulder, curling softly about her face as she glances down. She’s watching the cane as it finally pulls away from Chris and then she slaps him.

His fingers automatically clench into the bed, stopping his backwards rock. She hit him hard enough to send his head over, a buzzing pain whiplashing up and down his neck, but he doesn’t fall completely. He breathes out, blinking, and his cheek goes up in a five-fingered flame. Chris breathes in, turning back, and Lydia touches him under the chin.

He stops and she turns his head the rest of the way, careful, light fingers on his jaw, well short of the slapped burn. She’s not smiling as she looks him over, slow and thorough and strangely disenchanted with whatever she’s seeing. Her thumb rises and just grazes his bottom lip at the plumpest part. It’s not a caress, he knows that, but he breathes in slowly and looks at her and he’s drawing himself up when she snaps the crook of the cane into his gut and slams the wind out of him.

Chris does go over this time. He coughs, his arm slinging across his pain-wracked belly, half-curling on himself, and as his weight shifts onto his injured leg he groans. The sound compresses his ribs and that ripples down his torso and the pain in his gut seems to collapse in on itself till it’s a tight, excruciating knot with hot strings of agony pulling through every limb.

“This is why it’s so—” Lydia says, sudden and sharp and _irritated_. And then she’s climbing on him, cane discarded, her skirts rucked with deliberate roughness up to her waist.

She pushes him over, pulls his arms out to either side of him as she straddles his thighs. Doesn’t spare the hurt one and that by itself is enough to put him down, but then she reaches down and cups her hand over his groin. Her fingers probe at his inseam, working out the lay of his cock, and it’s impersonal the way she does it, just fact-finding.

He’s soft. She scowls at him. “It’d be easier if you were just a masochist,” she snaps.

Chris is still gasping back his breath. He lifts weak hands, then lets them fall back as he slumps under her. “Sorry,” he says.

Lydia sits on him for a minute, maybe two. She’s quiet but she’s thinking, her irritation lost in cold analysis. “I can’t believe that when I can see—Stiles and I can both see you know what you’re doing,” she finally says. “You’re playing at something, Chris. And it’s new, and new is interesting, but we’ve seen how your family plays before.”

“My family’s dead,” Chris says, staring at the ceiling of this house somebody in his bloodline bought generations ago. “We killed them, remember?”

“We didn’t kill you,” Lydia says.

“You could’ve.” Chris holds his breath, but he doesn’t feel an inch of her shift. The pain in his belly slowly fades, in ragged bites inwards towards that hard knot of agony, and then he breathes out and the whole thing just unravels, like somehow he’s found that one secret loop that unlocks everything. “You still can.”

There’s a thread of laughter in her voice, dark against the golden honey tones. “Are we trying reverse psychology now?”

He looks at her. At how she’s sitting on him, hair falling in silky ruffles over her shoulders, clothes rumpled, and under all of that she’s still this smooth, cool animal staring back at him, living in the same world, in the same space, and yet their points of reference are so far apart that he thinks he could see right into her mind, and still have no idea what she’s really thinking.

Chris is starting to get hard now. His cock is pressing up against the pull of his trousers over it, rising to nudge into her palm that’s still over the head. She knows it too, says the slight widening of her eyes. She doesn’t move other than that and his cock gets harder, shoving itself against the trouser seam, getting sticky at the tip, pushing a low, throbbing, insistent ache up its length and back into his groin, into his gut. And all the lengths of pain that had unraveled just a second ago draw up again, reforming that knot and making him groan.

“I’m just saying,” he says. He puts his head back. Doesn’t watch her anymore, but that doesn’t matter, even without that he’s shifting his hips, squeezing at the bed with his hands. “I don’t care, Lydia. I never cared about that. If you want to know what I’m getting at now, it’s about all the other things I ended up caring about, once you two showed up.”

She lets out that laugh that’s been bubbling up in her and it’s dark as his thoughts, but it’s comfortable the way it is, loose and casual in a way that makes him close his eyes and shiver. Her thumb runs up the side of his cock, sliding a groan from him, and then her cool fingers undo the front of his trousers, slip into them, pull his cock out. “So it’s all our fault, what you’re doing? Is that what you’re saying?”

As she talks, Lydia pushes herself up. Her other hand palms at his hip, then skins under his shirt. She strokes over his belly, then rakes it with her nails on the backstroke. Chris hisses, arching, and she sits up and lifts his cock between her legs so that he can feel the wet heat of her on the head of it, can feel the tingle of warmth and the promise of bare skin and no more.

He bites the side of his mouth, gouges his fingers into the bed, turns his head into the sheets. She doesn’t say not to touch her, and he’s touched her before. He was careless about it, starving now that he thinks about it; he missed that, missed just feeling soft warm flesh under his hands that wasn’t his, and they were so good about giving him that. He’d thought, at one point, that they’d missed that too, that that was maybe why they’d come to find him. Because he knew what his father was like, and he knew why they’d end up missing that sort of thing, after dealing with Gerard.

But he was wrong about that. And he can’t afford to be careless now, not with this, and they’re right, he’s not floundering, he has something in mind but that doesn’t mean he’s got it all worked out. She touches him, she rubs her thumb over and over the side of his cock, hard and bruising, soft as a whisper, and he’s dying either way but he buries his hands in the bed. Bites his own lip till it bleeds, shuts his eyes till they ache, just trying not to reach.

He can’t answer her, not like that, and Lydia leans over him, her hair flickering in silky wisps across his breast, then up to pool in ticklish, fragrant loops on his bare skin, trapped by the sides of his shirt-collar. Her mouth latches onto the side of his jaw as he pants and shoves his cock into her hand, and God, her fingers are dry and cool, and as smooth as they are, they’re still too dry and it _hurts_ , he’s burning himself, rubbing off his skin against her hand but he can’t stop.

And then she sinks herself onto his cock and he cries out and his hands come off the bed and he’s almost got her hips when she slaps his wrists back down. Chris jerks his head over, opens his eyes and above him Lydia is baring her teeth at him. She’s not smiling, she’s showing him her anger, the one part of her that he maybe still understands.

“Chris,” she says. She’s a little breathless. There’s a trickle of sweat skirting her hairline, and damp patches on her blouse under her breasts, but when she grinds down on his wrists, wrenches herself on his cock, she tells him he’s a fool to even look to those. “Chris.”

He can’t speak but he makes a rough, acknowledging noise, raising his chin. Lydia takes a hand off his wrist and belts him across the face again, and the pain is nothing, it’s a flash of agony when he’s already boiling alive, but something about it twists into him and twists him up and he comes hard, his head pinned sideways to the bed by the afterburn of her slap.

She stills for that. Keeps herself in place as he thrashes and writhes. He thinks he bruises himself, running his hips up into the prison of her legs, and he almost wonders if he hurt her, before he gets a look at her again. And then, when he’s done, flat out and chasing his breath, she’s still unmoving. Looking at him, running her eyes over his face again and again, and the way she looks at him, he realizes that he’s just as alien to her.

He doesn’t understand it—he’s cracked open, she can pick up every piece and do what she wants—but he knows it, same way that animals know how to find food and water.

“Lydia,” he says. He runs out of air and licks his lips, and she moves and he thinks she’s leaning towards him and God, he knows she’s not the same now but he doesn’t think he _wants_ the old Lydia. The old them.

And she sees it, and pauses. And then she smiles at him, relaxing out of her stillness. She puts her hands on his shoulders, then slides them so that she’s pulling the sides of his shirt-collar apart. Her thumbs slide up the side of his neck, nails first, and he groans at the sharp lines of pain that follow. Groans, puts his head back and she works up his body and then presses herself down on his face.

She has him lick her out. Pulling his arms over his head, rubbing her thumbs into his palms and digging her nails into his wrists, as he cleans out what he’s done to her. His lips stretch and compress till they ache as he forces his head up, gets his tongue into her to the root and then scrapes and sucks and laps till he gets everything, and above him she rocks, slow and methodical, till that one moment when Lydia stops using him and just grips him, shuddering with a single quick gasp.

“I’m going to talk to Stiles,” she says, when she’s sat back and pulled down her skirt. She brushes her fingers through her hair, smooths her blouse and she’s sleek again, while he lies next to her with his cock hanging out of his trousers and his shirt-collar stuck to his throat by her juices and her marks bruising up all over him. “We’ll be by before we go.”

He sucks in his breath, and doesn’t ask when they’ll be back, if they’ll be back. He’s already cooling and he doesn’t take that like they do, he shivers and his limbs twitch in like he could ever warm himself with himself and that knot in his gut starts hardening in place.

“It’s not,” he starts, and this time, she waits for him to finish. “It’s not…it’s what you did, but it’s not your fault. I did it too.”

She looks at him, and then she turns away. “Maybe it’s not masochism,” she says. “But it’s close enough, I wonder how much the difference matters.”

“I don’t think it does,” Chris says. “I don’t think it changes things for you, anyway.”

Lydia gets off the bed. He turns towards her, before he can stop himself, and then he wraps his hand around the edge of the bed again. She glances over her shoulder, then tosses her hair into the way and leaves. He watches her.

* * *

Chris isn’t going to be able to leave England for at least a couple more weeks. He doesn’t think they’d go back to France so soon—they haven’t said, but he knows they spent too much on getting him out and factoring him into their clean-up. They can be as good as they like, but some things are nothing more and nothing less than a matter of time and accumulating the kind of resources to keep from getting arrested for a massacre is one of them. So they’ll go somewhere else to get work.

He’s still going to France. And he will have those resources, and more than he’ll ever need in his lifetime, soon enough, but he doesn’t have them yet. So he has to settle in London, and wait, and he’ll work too.

There are his physical therapy, the investigations, the legal proceedings for his inheritance. The extra-legal proceedings. Plenty of work, and yet, he still ends up with more hours than he has things to do, probably because he can sleep very little now, and only in fits and starts.

Sometimes he lies in bed anyway, and he dreams about what’s already happened, which should be better than dreaming about what could have been, except that it also includes dreaming about what Stiles and Lydia were like when they first came to him. Sweet and shaky and stronger than him in spite of all that, with how they were still looking to connect to something, someone, about all their dead loved ones. He might have loved them like that, eventually, if they’d stayed that way.

The thing is, it’s not like Chris didn’t see them luring him in. He wasn’t quite right, in the end, about the why, but he was about the how. And the thing is—luring somebody, you have to do that by tempting them with the promise of more. So the act they put on at first, whatever that was, that wasn’t the real lure. That wasn’t what he kept getting up and trailing after, step by step, till it’d all ended with him in a pool of blood in his family’s old estate house. The real lure was always those flashes of them as they are now.

Does he want them the way they were? No, because he’s not who he was. But does he miss the old them?

The old him didn’t love them, because the old him didn’t love anybody, not after Allison died. And he doesn’t miss the old him, but not because he hates how he was or fears that or is appalled by it. It’s just, the old him, it’s dead and buried and gone. And he did that, he killed it and put it under, and so he knows there’s no chance of anything being left. So that shouldn’t matter anymore.

But he dreams about them, about how they were, and he doesn’t understand why he wakes up clenched around himself, his eyes wet and his jaw locked, a low, terrible pain in his gut. He more than hates himself—in those moments, he thinks he would’ve killed Allison himself, just to spare her having him as a father.

When that happens, Chris gets up and he goes through what his family’s left him, the physical things. What’s in the townhouse. Things in safe deposit boxes, and other safe-keeping storage, that get sent or brought to him, or he goes and gets them. There’s more in France that can’t be sent over, but he goes through what he has. Keeps some to use, puts some back—never throws them out, because objects don’t live and die like people and so he sees no point in burying them—and some he just doesn’t know what to do with.

The box of leather collars he opens the night they see him again. His family used to hunt wolves for a living and they bred and trained hunting dogs for a long time after, a kind of calling card of their ways. He supposes the collars are left over from that. Most of them are brittle with age, flakes cracking off even as he breathes on them, nameplates so tarnished that they’re unreadable. He’s still sorting through them when Stiles and Lydia knock on the front door.

“Spring cleaning?” Lydia says, seeing the box.

“Whatever, let’s go,” Stiles says.

They don’t touch him, just fall in behind so that he’s got no choice but to keep going forward. He calls off his men from their car—Stiles drives, Lydia sits in the back beside Chris so she’s the one directly behind Stiles—and they drive him to a hotel, just decent enough to be unmemorable. Then they walk him up to a room.

Chris recognizes the man staying in it. He’s one of the many FBI agents who’s looked into his father over the years, and from the bitter, biting mumble, he’s been regretting what he saw looking back ever since. That alone is nothing special, but from the way he and Stiles and Lydia talk, they’ve done business, and that makes him the first person Chris has met who’s lived, after Chris himself.

“Do I want to know?” the man says, sizing Chris up, recognition in his face too.

“Nope, just be glad for the extra practice while you’re getting set up,” Stiles says. He sits on the edge of the bed, his feet kicking carelessly, and then pats at the spot beside him. “C’mon over, Chris. Lie down.”

“Shirt off,” Lydia says. She takes the lone chair in the room, pulling her phone out, looking for all the world like the bored spouse waiting on the shopping one. “It’s going on his back.”

She’s talking to the FBI agent, who shrugs and goes into the bathroom. He comes out a few minutes later, carrying a tray with gauze, antiseptics, tattooing equipment. Pauses a yard short, his fingers twitching, wishing for a gun that he plainly doesn’t have.

“He just going to hold still for it?” he finally asks, when Stiles raises a brow.

Stiles puts on a face as if he never would have considered that, and then he looks over at Chris. “Well, are you?”

By then Chris is sitting on the bed, with his shirt puddled in his lap. He looks at the needles in their sterile sleeves, and then he bends down. Takes off his shoes and socks, tucks the socks into the shoes. He pushes back up but doesn’t bother raising his head too much; he’s just turning himself to get his legs onto the bed, so he can lie on his stomach.

He goes crosswise at first, meaning to have his feet pointing towards the far wall, but Stiles’ hand on his shoulder stops him. He looks up, his fingers suddenly jamming white-knuckled into the bed, and Stiles shrugs as if that’s nothing. 

“This way,” he says, pulling till Chris’ head is resting on his thigh.

It’s more awkward. The wall gets in the way so Chris can’t put his legs straight, and he has to curl them up, toes hooking over the headboard. The position presses his stomach into the bed, bowing his back so an ache is already pooling at the base of his spine. His thigh burns like it still has stitches in it.

His body tenses at the first jab of the needle, but that’s…something like sense memory, more than anything else. He doesn’t really notice the pain. The FBI man, his tattooist, he mutters curses under his breath like the needle’s stabbing _him_ , unnerved and hating himself and doing it anyway with the fatalism of one of the condemned. Chris and Stiles and Lydia all ignore him. Lydia’s still on her phone, and after the first few seconds, Stiles takes out one too.

But when the tattooist takes a break—he stenciled three separate designs, small circles marching down one side of Chris’ back—Stiles looks up and then he puts his hand on the back of Chris’ neck. His palm is warm, heavy, and Chris bites a low noise into Stiles’ thigh.

“This what you’re getting into now?” the tattooist says, half-disgusted, half-fascinated. “Lot of baggage for new operators, isn’t it?”

“We aren’t setting you up for your judgment, Messner,” Stiles says, light but edged. His fingers ripple into the side of Chris’ neck, mirroring the way Chris’ grip tightens on the sheets. “I wanted unsolicited advice, I would’ve gone with one of your colleagues.”

The tattooist laughs harshly. “What, like McCall? Oh, wait, he’s dead too.”

Stiles’ hand doesn’t move. It presses down on Chris the same amount, the same place, as the tattooist curses, much more sharply than before, fear over resentment, and drops something that rattles on the tray. Over in the corner Lydia’s skirts rustle.

“Let’s talk about your situation,” she says crisply.

They discuss immigration visas and business licenses. Chris keeps an ear on it, even after he realizes that there’s nothing to the conversation that will tell him where Stiles and Lydia are going, or what they’ll be doing. From the sound of things, Messner’s here because he needs protection that the U.S. authorities can’t provide, and so he’s a factor in the world that Chris moves in, even if he seems likely to be a marginal one. But that’s how Chris thinks now.

After the second tattoo, Stiles gets up to stretch his legs and Lydia replaces him on the bed, puts her thigh under Chris’ head and her hand on his neck. She curls her fingers higher up, her nails sliding into his hairline, and she moves them, little back and forth brushes that make him tremble and suck his breath.

“I have to sleep on this bed,” Messner says under his breath, wiping blood off Chris’ back with some gauze. “I know I owe you, but you’re paying for the damn room, you want the extra cleaning fees?”

“The room’s getting cleaned anyway,” Stiles says. He’s standing at the window, looking out in between glances at his phone. He doesn’t seem hurried or nervous, just expectant.

Messner raises his head and the needle, and Lydia reaches over and takes the bloodied gauze from his hand. “Finish up,” she orders.

He has to steady his needle hand with his other arm, planting his elbow in the soft part of Chris’ side, under the ribcage. When he’s finally done, the spot flushes up with ache and then sends out lancing spikes all around, and Chris can’t keep his muscles from spasming as the man tries to tape gauze over the tattoos. Finally Lydia takes the gauze and tape away from him, and does that herself, using her nails as pins against Chris’ back.

Stiles walks Messner around the room, shadowing the man as he puts away the tattooing gear and packs up his meager belongings. Then he ushers Messner out, closing the door behind him, and Lydia puts her hand under Chris’ chin and drags his head up, till his spine is almost cracking. She stoops and looks him in the eye, as he struggles not to choke in her face, and then she reaches under him, wedging her arm down his chest and belly till she can feel his cock.

He’s half-hard, and his erection stiffens as she drags her finger across it, letting his weight crush him into her. “Don’t think too hard on that,” she says, nodding at his back. “It’s not an answer.”

“It’s just seeing if it works, right?” he says. Her nails curl in along either side of his fly and he hisses, his hips humping up and away. “This better?”

Lydia’s calm, and then she’s calm and angry. Her lips thin out, and then she takes a deep breath.

In answer she drags him up by the neck, and presses him under her skirt, leaning back against the footboard. She keeps the grip as he eats her out, and when she comes her other hand snaps down and almost hits the topmost tattoo.

Stiles comes back then. He closes the door and stands against it, watching, and when Lydia’s relaxed back against the footboard, only panting a little, he crosses the room and climbs onto the bed behind Chris. “I guess this works better,” he says to Chris.

Who laughs, as Lydia tenses, and he’s still laughing when Stiles takes him by the knees and jerks till his head’s out of Lydia’s skirt. Stiles makes an annoyed sound, picking up from Lydia whatever he needs to know about what she and Chris talked about while he was out, and then he pulls down Chris’ pants and pushes his fingers between Chris’ buttocks.

He’s using lube but it’s rough anyway. Not careless—rough. Sharp merciless movements that don’t give Chris the space to breathe in between fresh points of pain, and Chris is already short from his laughter. Chris gasps, hooking his fingers into the bed, his head spinning. His throat starts to burn from the way the air’s raking it on the way up and down. The fresh tattoos on his back burn too, but _down_ , into him, like the ink’s turned to red-hot metal and won’t stop sinking in.

Stiles fucks him with two fingers, driving them in over and over till the pressure starts to mount, coiling up Chris’ spine and forcing his shoulders back against the weight of it. And then, just as it starts to break, the man pulls back. Just his fingertips inside, just teasing as Chris clutches the bed and clenches down at their fluttering, feeling the rim of his hole not quite grab them. Chris groans and Lydia reaches over, puts her hand back on his nape and presses him to the bed.

She sits up. Her thighs close around his head, down-soft and silky, warmly shutting out the air, and then they slide open just as he chokes. She keeps pushing down on his neck as Stiles slides up beside Chris, humming to himself, body jerking in lazy, regular movements that tell Chris what he’s doing with himself. A wet cock head grazes Chris’ hip and Chris starts, only to ram his neck into the hard brace of Lydia’s hand.

Chris subsides and Stiles rolls off a little, just letting him hear the other man come to climax and then sigh in satisfaction. At the same time, Stiles starts fingering him again, but slower, maddeningly slow, rubbing his fingerpads over that cluster of nerves so that Chris goes from pleasure to pain to white-hot mindlessness, and then to something else, something past all of that. The pressure’s so steady, so unrelenting that his nerves run out of ways to respond and just seem to flicker and die, one by one, leaving him paralyzed as Stiles just keeps holding down the same spot.

It’s like being numb, except that Chris is still feeling and what he’s feeling is all things at once and human minds just weren’t meant for that. He can’t process it, can’t even really feel it, it’s too much, and he can’t find that one break that would let him snap and fall into unconsciousness and he—

Lydia rubs at his neck. He’s forgotten he has a body beyond that spot, that’s how overwhelmed he is, but that one caress, that reminds him like a blow to the head. Chris twists and Stiles hooks his fingers, dragging him one way, and Lydia pinches his throat, pulling him the other, and somewhere between the two of them he finally tears.

He goes out, and then he comes back. He’s clean, dressed, and alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Messner is from _Smokin' Aces_ , and is played by Ryan Reynolds. His backstory in this 'verse is explained in _Dead Reckoning_.


	3. Chapter 3

He knows he upset them, is upsetting to them, but he doesn’t think that’s why they left like that. They were both waiting on something, and they didn’t just leave Chris, they made Messner move.

Chris thinks like that now, even as he limps back to his house, collapses just inside the front door, watches his hands shake and shoves down his trousers to see bruises blossoming up around the bullet scar. Internal bleeding, maybe, he’ll have to get it checked out on top of everything else.

Or maybe he always thought like that. He loved his wife, adored his daughter, drove himself out of his own family and into a quiet, suburban, unprivileged life for their sakes, even as he watched his father burn down family after family and never warned any of them. He moved Allison to France to save her, and then let his French relatives convince him to give her one more summer with Gerard in America, just a summer, just a sop to an old man’s pride, as the price of their intervention with his father. He did everything to stay _safe_ , and yet he played the risk game anyway.

He doesn’t pretend anymore, at least. He gets the doctor in for his leg and talks to his lawyers and sends out his men. Makes his bets, clear-eyed, with the losses already accounted for. But that’s easy when none of it is really his, anyway. It’s just what he’s been left.

At the end of the month he gets on the train in London and he gets off in Paris. He’s under watch, of course, but he isn’t arrested, and he isn’t going to be arrested.

His family has another townhouse he owns now. He has to stay there for now because the country estate is still a closed crime scene, though the lawyers say they’ll have it back to him soon. He shrugs and he makes do in another barebones office with a cot in the corner. He doesn’t think he’ll be entertaining visitors he cares about any time soon, after all.

Chris is out more in France. His leg allows for it, and with his family’s business interests, old-fashioned personal involvement is mandatory. With the new areas he’s moving into, face to face is virtually the only way to work.

His family smuggled, counterfeited, laundered money. They’d been dropping some of the work with higher overheads—anything with living things, some of the drugs coming out of Latin America, too much local fighting for them to afford the constant cannon fodder—and it’s easier than he expects to shift the rest of the way into intangibles like data, technology, secrets. Profit margins are a little thinner, payment tends to happen on a longer scale; information is like wine, fetching a better price when aged, as often as it’s like fresh milk. Overhead is much lower, of course, since storage is less of an expense.

And anyway, he’s mobile and he can use a gun and a knife and all the other things that people come up to do damage to other people. If there’s wet work to be done, he can handle it as well as, and usually better than, anybody he can hire. That wouldn’t be as true if he went up a few grades in who he hires, but he doesn’t need perfect skill to do what he needs.

When he’s more secure, he bleeds off his excess men in fights to clear out the newer groups. The older ones, they’ve made inroads too, but they’re used to having an Argent in the picture and they’re more willing to cut deals with him. He promises not to work where they do and in return they leave him alone. More than a few do better than that, and turn into clients, and then they see the point in having him around and they take an interest in squeezing out any insurgents, too.

It takes a couple months. He stays in Paris the whole time, and he doesn’t see anybody he doesn’t pay or who isn’t paying him.

* * *

Stiles and Lydia are doing well for themselves. There’s no such thing as anonymity, and especially not in the underworld, where you want to know who you’re dealing with since if anything goes wrong, you can’t call the authorities to report it. And on the level that they’re gunning for, it’s necessary to be known in certain ways. Even the best mercenaries need clients to hear of them in the first place.

They did some work before they hunted Chris down. Starter contracts, the odd risky client that Chris assumes was just practice for them—job itself a straightforward one, the skill in how they handled and collected from the client—and then a sudden jump to high-profile work. It’s a little puzzling, and then he thinks to look away from the contracts, at kills where there was no client, just a body, and he picks up the in-between work.

A couple messes. Nothing too bad, in the long run, once they’d survived the initial fuck-up. They taught themselves to clean up before they got to him. Some people might look at it and say they got lucky. Chris doubts it; things might’ve fell in their favor, but that’s different. With luck you don’t have to lift a finger and it fixes everything. What he thinks happened is that they took their favors and invested them and made sure of the return.

They did well enough at it that they won’t need to worry about the authorities, and their clients, the good ones, they’re generally happy. That doesn’t mean they don’t have any blowback at all lurking, but when you’re killing people, unless you mean to kill _everyone_ , that’s not possible to avoid. And when you’re killing as a job, killing everyone is a sloppy way to do business, eats up your profit.

The remaining risk factors into whatever fees they set, and they must be satisfied with it but Chris looks and he sees a few of those leftovers in France, in Francophone areas, in regions where, now that he’s set up, he has influence. It costs him, of course, because he has no one paying him for it, and he gets nothing in return. He doesn’t even get practice; he already has the skills.

He wipes them out anyway. He has no family, no hobbies, no need for something like a retirement fund. He can afford to spend the principal.

Chris isn’t stupid enough to think that that might earn him anything with Stiles and Lydia, but he knows they’ll pick up on it. And he does think about that, lying in his Paris townhouse. Or standing in the bathroom, peeling off the gauze and looking at the marks they gave him. Lydia said don’t think on them so he doesn’t, but she didn’t say not to look and he has to.

He touches, too. He lies on his side and works his cock with his one hand, and puts his other hand over his shoulder and he just digs into the top tattoo, pushing at barely-healed flesh till the inked parts swell and rise up. They’re small black circles, filled in with different amounts. One looks like a black pearl with that sliver of highlight to denote the sheen, it’s so inked in, while another is empty, and the third is in between.

Sometimes, when he comes, he grabs at his thigh, over the bulletholes, and he presses at the scar tissue with his thumb. The ache goes all the way down to his bone, worse than the way the damp and the cold sometimes stiffen up his leg, and leaves him lying in his own mess, shivering and whimpering.

Still, it’s better when he’s exhausted. When he’s not, when he can still get up and move, then he ends up sorting through his family’s things again, and he turns up photo albums. Himself and Kate and their mother, all smiling. He doesn’t even feel like he has a sister anymore; he sits and he stares at their smiles, at how he’s holding Kate’s hand, and it’s like somebody invented a past for him because he doesn’t feel anything except that odd frisson of recognizing a face.

Jewelry. He took off his wedding ring when Victoria died, right after her funeral. Not because he wanted to forget her, or because he was ready to move on, but because that ring belonged to her husband, to a man who’d taken a solemn vow to love and cherish and protect her, and he hadn’t managed that. So he didn’t deserve to wear it, and he put it away in a box and now he finds it again.

It’s the same box that Allison’s necklace is in, the one they found on her body. They identified her with that and her dental records, and when Stiles and Lydia brought the body, it and a few of her other things was sitting in a little plastic bag inside the coffin. The necklace is still in that bag.

Chris sits there and he looks at them, and very little has hurt, truly hurt, since he first woke up in the hospital, but they hurt him. He holds them and they’re little, chilly, metal things, but he thinks for a second that they’re worse than live coals.

He thinks about throwing them away. Destroying them. He even gets up and goes to the basement and he tears through the boxes till he finds a metal cup, a set of metal tongs, with some wild idea about melting them down, and then a small vial slips through his fingers and falls back into one box.

It’s the bullet fragments they took out of his thigh. Held back from the authorities, slipped to him on his way out when he moved to the private clinic, and he threw them in when he was packing up to move out of London. Chris sits down again, on the chilly, dirty concrete floor, and he holds the vial in one hand and his wife’s ring and his daughter’s necklace in his other, and he bows till his head touches the edge of the box.

He doesn’t cry. He did cry, when Stiles and Lydia were around, and every time his eyes start to burn, he starts to remember how they’d hand him tissues and steal his whiskey and then just sit with him. And he doesn’t miss them like that, he isn’t even built for that anymore, but he doesn’t want to _remember_ how they were.

Because if he does, he knows he’ll wonder, even though he doesn’t want that them anymore. He’ll wonder if that’d all been an act. And he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to ask.

Chris wraps his fingers into a fist, so the links of Allison’s necklace bite at his palm, and he hits himself on the thigh. He forgets and it’s the wrong one, it’s not the aching, bullet-scarred one. But when he hits that, it doesn’t hurt enough. He doesn’t stop thinking about how they were, and so he has to get up.

He has to get up, and go upstairs and stop it, and instead he sits down with the damn things, with these little pieces that he thinks he hates, that’s how much he doesn’t want to think about it, and that he can’t get rid of, and then he remembers the tattoos. And that he doesn’t know what they mean. They’re on his back, he doesn’t have to. Stiles and Lydia know where they are, what they look like, what they mean, and since they do, he doesn’t have to.

The next day, he goes to a jeweler, and he has them made into earrings, the ring and the necklace. Plain studs. They’re sent to his house when they’re ready, and he pierces his ear himself. It hurts, but just for a second. And then the earrings are in, and he knows they’re there, he has to take care of the piercings. He knows what they mean. But he also knows they’re not going anywhere and so that means he can just push them aside. He doesn’t have to think about them.

* * *

When he sees Stiles and Lydia next, he’s about to move from Paris to his family’s country estate. Everything is packed and his men are dismissed and he’s cooking his dinner when they walk into the kitchen.

He cooks because he wants to be sure of his food. He cooks because it’s another thing to keep him moving. And he cooks because it’s a skill, and he keeps his skills now, he doesn’t throw them away.

“Oh, my favorite,” Stiles says.

Chris flinches, and the chicken breast drops from the tongs and slaps onto the rim of the plate. It doesn’t fall off but it’s close, the plate rattling, juices splattering across the counter and up onto Chris’ hand instead of pooling under the breast.

“Hey, careful, don’t waste it,” Stiles says. He pulls a chair out, sits in it. Lydia’s heels keep clicking and she takes the chair on the other side, from the sound of it.

Instead of turning around, Chris nudges the chicken breast to safety, and then removes the rest of the breasts from the pan. He was cooking for just himself, enough to eat for the next couple days, and now it’s enough to make a meal for three.

He cooked this dish for them before, and Stiles said it was his favorite then, too. Especially the pan sauce, which Chris makes with shaking hands that almost lose the bottle of wine twice, but which pours out rich and brown with that elusive golden sheen. When he puts down the plates, Stiles reaches out and dips a finger into that sauce and then sucks it off.

“Barbarian,” Lydia says, sniffing, as she takes a healthy mouthful of hers.

“Not on the clock, I can have whatever manners I feel like,” Stiles says.

They act like they are now, lounging predators, smiling at each other, but they sound too close to how they were and Chris loses his appetite. He still sits down, but he doesn’t bother to get silverware for himself. Just leaves his hands resting on either side of his plate.

“You’re hungry,” Stiles says, looking over. He’s cut his hair since Chris last saw him. His shirt’s better-fitting, though the tails are untucked and wrinkled, and he has dress shoes on instead of sneakers. “I can see it.”

Chris doesn’t think it’s a question, so he doesn’t say anything. Stiles’ eyes narrow a little and a spark of irritation goes through them, and Chris _does_ try to say something then, but he’s too slow.

“Just give me that,” Stiles says, taking Chris’ plate from him. He elbows his own out of the way and then bends over Chris’ food, slicing the meat up, running every piece through the sauce, portioning out the pearl onions that go with it.

Lydia’s nose wrinkles a little as she looks at them. Her eye flicks to where Stiles’ sleeve is dangerously near the sauce—Stiles’ mouth twitches, sensing it—and then she sighs heavily. She puts the fingertips of one hand on the table and then arches them, making a cup of her hand as she gets up and swivels around the corner and then puts her other hand on Chris’ shoulder.

“Down, knees,” she says.

Chris gets off his seat and kneels, facing Stiles. She walks behind him and bends over and something pulls around his wrists. Leather, he thinks, blinking, as there’s a bright metallic click and then she steps away, leaving him with his arms bound behind him. He flexes his fingers out, not testing the bonds so much as trying to settle himself, and the leather stretches a little but it’s thick and heavy, molding over the bones of his wrist like it was poured in place.

“Nerve damage, gangrene, not really a great idea if you’re gonna keep your hand in your kind of work,” Stiles says, spearing a piece of chicken and an onion together. He swirls them in the sauce a second longer, then turns and holds it out towards Chris. “And I guess you could get one of those dictation software kits, but you seem pretty physical about your info gathering. You could still get up close, but you’re so good with a rifle, it’d be kind of a shame for you to lose that trigger finger.”

“We did some research. Since you clearly aren’t going to bother,” Lydia says, more succinctly. She feels around the cuffs, and then she checks his fingertips, pushing hard at one, seeing how quickly the color comes back, he guesses.

Then she steps back and she takes his old seat, moving it around so she and Stiles are on the same side. Stiles feeds Chris the food, and every so often Lydia bends over his head and reaches around and puts his glass to his lips.

“So, you’re doing pretty well if you can spend your free time making the world safe for the likes of us,” Stiles says. He’s starting to slouch, his knees spreading, canting his belly and groin towards Chris. His thumb slides further into Chris’ mouth than it needs to in order to wipe off the sauce. “Not that we needed it.”

“You eliminated at least one potential client,” Lydia says. She’s less relaxed, her nails tapping on the table as she eats her portion.

Stiles shrugs, but he’s not challenging her, not really. He’s just entertaining himself, and she knows it, from the irritated way she looks at him. “I’m pretty sure somebody will step into that vacuum and we’ll get paid in the next war,” Stiles says. “Sometimes, honestly, I don’t think it’s the people who are clients so much as the place, right? ‘cause some places, they just seem like they’re built for killers.”

“Killing off your client base still isn’t a sustainable business strategy,” Lydia points out.

“I didn’t know you were counting on them,” Chris says. He doesn’t know who they mean, but he’s not stupid enough to ask that.

Lydia’s not stupid enough to let that dodge by, either. “And is that what you were hoping for? That’d we’d come back if we were annoyed enough?”

“I don’t know, Lyds, he doesn’t look that scared to me.” Stiles drops the fork and leans forward on his knees, one hand out to pet at Chris’ jaw. He swipes his thumb under Chris’ chin, tilting Chris’ head up. “Or that excited, actually. I don’t think he’s a danger junkie.”

“Well, we knew that, didn’t we? When he just ran back to his family to hide from his father. That’s not frying pan to fire, that’s straight fire to fire. No threat if you’re used to it,” Lydia says tartly.

Chris opens his mouth and Stiles catches him by the throat, stopping what he was going to say. The man’s not strangling him, just holding tight enough to feel, but it’s as good as a noose.

Stiles is detached about it, his humor dropping away as he studies Chris. “You put the Argent name back on the map, you gotta know that you can’t just turn into our Q or whatever,” he says after a moment. “That’s worse than helping us. It’s better if you stay separate.”

“I know,” Chris says. The gorge of his throat compresses every time he swallows, forced up against Stiles’ hand.

He senses Lydia move up behind him, and then her hand is on the back of his head. She spreads her fingers, cradling him, sifting through his hair till she’s got fingertips on his scalp, and then she rocks her hand. Pushes him into Stiles’ grip, hard enough that he gasps a little, and Stiles frowns and shakes his head.

Lydia eases off, but then she touches his earrings. He flinches and both she and Stiles prick alert.

“It’s not—” he starts. “It’s—I—”

“You gotta pretend like you ask us to approve everything? That your daddy issues coming out?” Stiles says. He’s loose about his sarcasm, he doesn’t even believe in his mockery, let alone believe it’s the truth.

He’s right. Chris shakes his head and then shivers as Lydia puts both hands on his shoulders, her thumbs dropped down to slide slowly against the edges of his shoulderblades, grooving into where it’s aching from how the cuffs pull back his arms. “No, it’s just—I don’t want to see—it’s her ring. Victoria’s. And Allison’s—one of her—”

Stiles gets up abruptly. He kicks at his chair and his foot catches, and he’s sharp enough to lean into the imbalance, let that swing him back to where he’s steady but for a moment he’s graceless and it’s shocking.

Then he’s free. He steps over a pace, then spins back and bends down and peers into Chris’ eyes. Takes Chris’ head in both hands, pulling it up as Lydia holds Chris by the shoulders, and then he grabs the side of Chris’ shirt-collar. He yanks hard, popping the first few buttons, then he shoves the shirt off that shoulder. He’s looking at the tattoos; Lydia’s tense but she moves just enough to not be in Stiles’ way.

“Well. Healed okay.” Stiles sounds a little less tight than how he’s touching Chris’ skin. “So you can take care of yourself sometimes.”

“It’s about all I can do, right,” Chris says. “I’m not good at taking care of other people.”

“I guess if you mean real care, and not just a euphemism,” Stiles says, and suddenly he’s back to amused. He backs off, then squats in front of Chris. Raises a hand and flicks at Chris’ shirt, the side that’s hanging off, and then he laughs and shakes his head and he runs his fingers from Chris’ shoulder all the way to where the shirt catches them up, about mid-belly. “Okay, so you went and decorated yourself a little. Think we like that? Tattoos are nice, so piercings must be okay?”

Lydia leans till her breasts are pressing into Chris’ back. She’s gripping Chris by the upper arms now, but she releases one arm to finger Chris’ ear, working around and between the earrings. “Some other reason?” she says, when Chris hesitates. “Just say it, Chris, it’s not like you can shock anybody here.”

“Not like you’re protecting us,” Stiles says, snickering.

“No, not that,” Chris finally says. He hitches, his breath catching, as Lydia molds to his back, as the taut gauze of her blouse brushes his skin, letting him feel the warmth of her breasts. Stiles puts his hands on Chris’ thighs and slides them up, then undoes his fly and pulls out his cock. “It—it wasn’t for you. It was for me, just—so I wouldn’t—I found them, them and the bullet that you left, and I—I just—I can’t—”

Stiles and Lydia glance at each other, with him between them. They don’t stop moving. Lydia’s hands drop to cup Chris’ buttocks, pulling his trousers further down as Stiles pulls out a tube of lubricant and slicks up Chris’ cock.

“Please,” Chris is left saying, twisting at his bound arms, shuddering from one to the other. “Please. I can’t, please, _please_.”

They play with him a little bit. Stiles passes the lube to Lydia and she opens him up from behind, while Stiles climbs onto Chris’ lap, straddles to trap Chris’ cock up between their bellies and then rolls into it as he drops his hand between his own legs.

“You can’t _ever_ ,” Lydia says in his ear, almost savage. She twists her fingers inside of him so he feels her nails, and when he bucks up and cries out, she’s the one who drags him back by the cuffs. “That’s all we ever get from you, Chris. As if you’re the only one who had people die on them.”

She shoves him back into Stiles, who fucks himself down onto Chris’ cock with a rough groan. He sways, grinning without humor, and then he humps forward, half-falling over Chris’ shoulder, and he and Lydia kiss. It’s long and fierce, Lydia pushing Stiles back, rocking Chris into the man at the same time, and when somebody puts an arm up to lock them together, keep them at it while Stiles rides Chris and Lydia’s fingers fuck him, it’s Lydia.

They didn’t kiss each other before. Pecks on the cheek, temple, that much. He had thought they were together, but from how they always pivoted towards each other, like two balls spinning on opposite ends of the same string. But they kissed him, when they all got in bed. They touched each other, sure, but not kissing.

It’s for him, he thinks suddenly. Not as a favor, not because they’re playing to his likes—they don’t _understand_ his likes now. So they want him to see, so they can see what it does to him, and at that Chris wrenches between them, burying his open-mouthed groan into Stiles’ shoulder, and comes.

Stiles doesn’t keep riding him. The man climbs off, letting Chris collapse to the floor. He’s still hard and he sighs, reaching for his erection, and then Lydia crawls over Chris and she turns herself around, back to Stiles. He doesn’t fuck her; he slings his arm around her waist, snickering when she yanks that hand down between her legs, and as he works her, she moans and arches, hot-eyed and bitten-lipped, and grabs his knee and pushes herself up him and then wraps her hand around his cock, pulling it out from under her so that when he comes, it goes all over the hand he has fingering her.

When they’re done, they get up and they clean themselves, clean the floor. Stiles takes the dishes to the sink, and Lydia leaves the room and comes back shortly in a new outfit, carrying a change of clothes for Stiles. They stand over Chris, watching as he pants, tries to wait out the spasming muscles of his overtaxed thigh, as Stiles dresses.

“I think we’re closer,” Stiles says to Lydia, the same as somebody would provide an update on travel time. He stoops and he tries to swipe at a streak on Chris’ thigh.

It’s lube and sweat and half-dried come, and it’s still too wet to flake, but too dry to come off. Stiles makes a face and withdraws his hand.

“Gonna pull off all the hairs, at this rate.” He tilts his head, thinking, and then he looks at Lydia.

She has her arms wrapped loosely around himself, not guarding herself, but likewise contemplative. “We’re in the kitchen, and we both wanted to try it,” she says. “Might as well.”

* * *

They drag Chris up from the floor. His leg immediately gives, the muscles locked up, but they’re just moving him to the table. Stiles unhooks the cuffs from each other and pulls his arms up, and uses rope to tie each cuff to a table leg, while Lydia stands between his knees and frowns at his thigh.

“Where are your medical records?” she says. “I don’t see your cane around.”

“Laptop,” Chris says. 

Stiles goes to get that, while Lydia busies herself around the kitchen. Chris can’t help but watch, the way people do when they see an animal they’ve never seen before. When they first came, Stiles could cook a little, enough to do without a microwave, but Lydia would make nothing besides coffee and tea. But she gets a pot out and fills it with water and sugar, and then she finds his cooking thermometer and puts that in. She leaves briefly, then returns with small bottles that she adds to the sugar syrup.

“What’s your password?” Stiles asks, coming back.

He has a knife too, and keeps that when he puts down the laptop. Stiles pulls himself up onto the table to sit cross-legged by Chris. He taps out the password with one hand as Chris recites each character, and with his other hand, the one holding the knife, he reaches over and he feels at Chris’ cheeks and jaw. The knife edge whispers near Chris’ eye, his cheekbone, his ear, a flare of ice coming off it that makes him shiver a little.

“Guess that’s smooth enough for now,” Stiles says. He leans back and hits ‘enter’ and as Chris’ computer boots up, he turns and starts cutting the clothes off Chris.

By the time he’s done, Lydia’s brought over her sugar syrup. It smells a little herbal, with an underlying freeze of mint. She perches on the edge of the table, between Chris’ legs, and she pokes at it with a wooden spoon as it cools.

“You kept the bullet,” she says.

“The doctors gave it to me, and I didn’t throw it out.” Chris is correcting her, and he winces at it but she merely nods. His leg is relaxing a little, and he grunts as he draws it fully up onto the table, so the weight of his foot won’t drag on it.

Stiles looks over, then reaches back and pulls up Chris’ other leg as well. Then he leans on Chris’ bent knee, scrolling through something on Chris’ laptop. “You can’t throw anything out, can you? I thought the bathroom looked a little dated.”

“No,” Chris says. He half-sees Lydia scoop some of the thickening syrup out of the pot and then she leans over him and he puts his head back. “I can’t. I can’t leave anything, Stiles, that’s why I shot myself in the first place. Why I was even there to meet you two.”

Stiles looks up and Lydia touches something warm and oddly solid, for all that it yields under her fingertips, to Chris, right at the top of his inner thigh. Then her hand jerks and a ragged splotch of skin flames over with stinging pain. Chris sucks his breath a little and his head tilts and he ends up looking at Stiles, who reaches over and rubs his thumb over Chris’ earrings, soft and gentle, as Lydia uses her sugar paste to rip the hair from Chris’ leg.

“So, the tattoos,” Stiles says abruptly. “You know what they are?”

“No,” Chris says.

Lydia stops, then moves to where she can see his face. “He doesn’t,” she says. She tilts her head. “You don’t.”

“You said not to think about it,” Chris says.

She frowns, and then she remembers and stands back. Then returns to her work on his leg. “And this is why it’s confusing, Chris, you take us literally some days and not others, and you listen about that but you go kill off people we don’t tell you to—”

“We thought you were fucking with us over them for a second there,” Stiles interrupts. He’s less annoyed than her, just shaking his head as he glances at Chris’ laptop. “But okay, you’re not that much like your dad. So they’re lunar phases, dates. It’s a calendar. We aren’t going to haul you through the Chunnel—Messner’s best in small doses anyway—so we’ve got an appointment for this time’s tat tomorrow morning. You weren’t doing anything, were you?”

No, Chris almost says. Lydia’s pulling the hair from his leg in brisk bursts, then swapping out her wad of paste for a fresh one and that’s when it goes from stinging to a blistering burn. He exhales roughly and drags at his cuffs, a low ache starting up in his shoulders too, and changes his mind. “My schedule’s on there.”

“Oh, so it is,” Stiles says cheerfully, over his tapping fingers. “Okay, well, you’re clear now. You know your dad?”

Lydia comes back and she’s dabbing the skin around his ankle, and it’s surprisingly tender there, the sting more like the pounding of needles. Chris shifts and she grabs his foot, and pins it.

“Yeah,” Chris groans. 

“He said, well, really, he misquoted something to us, this one time when he had us.” Stiles reaches over again, but this time he’s fingering one of Chris’ nipples. He pinches it when Lydia’s not working on Chris, and then lets go when she is, so Chris is seesawing dizzily between spikes of pain. “You want to be loved, you’re always going to lose against the people who don’t.”

“He said that to Scott,” Lydia corrects. She sits back and looks into her pot, then frowns. Then she gets off the table and carries the pot back to the stove to rewarm.

Stiles shrugs her off. “Anyway. Your dad fucks up on pretty much everything, but he’s also pretty good at fucking people up.”

“You’re not—you’re not blaming him,” Chris says. He hisses as Stiles leaves off his nipple, strokes his newly-denuded thigh instead, sparking a painful heat wherever he touches. “For me, or for—for you.”

“Nah. I mean, you, you know who to blame, we’re not going to do that for you.” Stiles leans over him and fondles his balls, tugging at their light covering of hair so Chris winces. “And we blame your dad for everybody he killed, but us, well, we’re adults now. Maybe Gerard gave us a couple ideas, but we sat down and we talked it through, Lydia and me. When we were healing up and all—you’d know, you know there’s not a lot else to do about but just think shit over. And we thought it over.”

He moves his hand to Chris’ cock. Scratches at it, at the itchy spots where Chris’ come has dried and is flaking now, scratches so it feels good and then it hurts and then it burns, and Chris is biting the inside of his mouth to keep from whining but God, his cock is hard again.

“I know,” Chris grates out.

Lydia comes back, and climbs onto the table again. This time she starts with Chris’ groin, working from the base of his erection out as Stiles grips it, makes sure he won’t come. It’s the same pain but another level, and when she gets to his scrotum, to the paper-fine skin behind that, it’s so excruciating that he opens his mouth and he doesn’t whine, he wheezes, unable to catch enough air for a whine.

“What, Chris?” Stiles says. He tweaks Chris’ cock, then leans over and drops a soft, quick kiss on Chris’ hissing lips. “Goddamn it, _what_ already?”

“I know—I know you don’t love me,” Chris gasps. Black spots dance across his vision afterward; he didn’t have the air for the words but he got them out anyway. “It’s not—I’m not looking—I don’t _want_ that—”

Stiles pushes himself up, then looks down as Chris. “Easier when you don’t have to worry about them loving you,” he says after a second, oddly still. “Your dad said that too.”

“I know, I know, he said that to me—” And then Chris can’t. He can’t breathe, he can’t see, he’s blacking out and he fights, he does, because whatever he says, last time he was out they left and he guessed about why but they still _left_ —

Something pinches his nose, covers his mouth. He chokes and his lips close around somebody else’s tongue, and then Stiles kisses him hard, keeps him from biting down. He needs air but he needs to stop gasping after it first, and Stiles makes him.

When Stiles lifts up, Chris is still dizzy, still watching black spangle across the world, but his throat isn’t seized up. He inhales till it hurts more than what Lydia’s doing to him with that sugar paste, and then he goes limp. He just lies there, not even hitching when she jerks the hairs off him.

“Can’t leave, yeah, I heard you,” Stiles says, and Chris can’t even look over, even though he wants to. He hears Stiles go back to the laptop. “So, we’re going after your dad now. I think we’re ready.”

“We thought we’d see you first,” Lydia says. She pauses and runs her hand over the skin she’s just done, before it’s even settled into that first burn, and her fingers burn like ice. “Thought we’d fuck you.”

Chris closes his eyes again. “Can you tell me something? Just—was I for him, or was I—was I just there?”

“We wouldn’t have gone to you if we thought he’d be along after us, Chris,” Stiles says, laughing suddenly. “Don’t be stupid. We’re just starting to get you.”

* * *

Lydia takes all the hair off both of his legs, and his groin, and up across his chest. She has to reheat the sugar a few times. Chris comes again before she’s done and she bends over, with her perfect glossy hair and her still-neat clothes, and she licks it up and his soft, overworked cock throbs like she’s got a spike for a tongue.

They don’t fuck him again but they fuck next to him, every little brush and graze and slide of their bodies over his raw skin like silk and like salt, soothing and burning in equal measures. He’s too wrung out to even get hard, can’t do anything but breathe and watch, but he gasps when they gasp. And then, afterward, when he’s lying between them, Lydia reaches down and runs her thumb over his pierced ear, and he feels that one touch like somebody’s branded it on his bones.

“We did all the research,” she says, her fingers stretching out till the tip of one nail points onto the pulse in his throat. “You’re strange enough, we had to.”

“This is usually where we’ve got a body to get rid of,” Stiles adds, curling up against Chris’ back, one hand centered squarely on the bullet scar on Chris’ thigh. He’s amused and a little curious.

Lydia draws her nail up the pulse line, not quite hard enough to scratch, and then she taps the side of Chris’ jaw as he looks at her. “This is messier, actually,” she says, with a sigh, and then she tips her head. “Where’s that bullet?”

Chris tells her. And in the morning, Lydia’s gone. Stiles takes him to get the next tattoo, in an illegal shop operating out of the back of a garage, and as the tattooist finishes, Lydia appears with a small box in her hand. It’s the bullet, turned into an earring. Stiles bends him over a table, twisting his wrists against his back, as Lydia studs it into his ear.

“I think I like it,” Stiles says, pulling him up, breath hot on the back of Chris’ neck.

Lydia steps forward, cups his jaw in both her hands, tilts his head back and forth and then smiles and kisses him lightly on the mouth. He moans for her, for Stiles, sagging as they press into him from either side, and for a moment he thinks they might like that, like how he is.

Then Stiles lets go of him. He’s off-balance and he staggers, then gets caught up because Lydia still has him by the jaw. Her nails sink into his flesh so deep that when she pulls them away, one is bloody.

She turns her hand and looks at it, and then looks at him. He can feel the blood beading on his skin, then dripping down, and it’s almost at his collar when Lydia reaches up and wipes it away with her thumb. Then she pauses, holding her thumb there, right where the skin is torn, and she presses a little and it starts to hurt.

Chris doesn’t do anything and Lydia pulls her hand away, the interest fading from her face. She turns around and reaches over the table. 

“What?” Stiles says, coming around, and then he sees the blood on her hand. He glances at Chris, who looks back, and after a second Stiles grimaces and shakes his head. “Well, it’s always got to be a _process_ with you, it looks like. You’re going to end up looking like an antique voodoo doll at this rate.”

“You don’t like marks?” Chris says, blinking. Something white comes up on the edge of his vision, he took his eyes off Lydia, and he flinches before he realizes it’s a cotton puff.

Lydia takes him by the jaw again and holds him as she swabs the blood away, wets the place with antiseptic instead and then bandages it. “Chris,” she says, looking him in the eye. She waits till he’s breathed in and out, looking at her, and then she gives his jaw a little tug, not to move it, just to emphasize. “If we want a mark on you, we’ll put one on.”

“All right,” Chris says. He doesn’t see what else he can say, but Stiles makes a disgusted noise and turns away, and Lydia moves her hand to his arm, a cold, standoffish guide.

They drive him back to his house, and then open the car door. He hesitates and Stiles reaches into the glove compartment, and takes out a hypodermic needle instead of a gun. He flicks the needle, then looks at Chris, and Chris fights back a shiver and jerks his feet out of the car, one at a time. He gets onto the sidewalk and he doesn’t go any farther.

The rear wheel comes within a hair of smashing his toes as they drive off. He watches till they’re gone, and then he goes inside and he thinks and he looks up the moon phases on the day of all the people they knew that his father killed. It’s a match with his back, except that there are more deaths than tattoos. He counts the difference, and for a second he grips the table and the air in his throat is stinging with fear and the grip inside his chest is icy and brutally tight.

Chris breathes out. He can’t do anything about it. What’s dead is dead. When time runs out, it’s gone. If they leave him—when they leave him, they leave.

He can’t leave. So he closes the browser window and opens up another on his laptop, and goes back to work.


	4. Chapter 4

His father’s dead, one of his regulars lets him know a few weeks later. Chris is at his family’s country estate by then, settled enough to start interviewing architects and signing up lawyers with historical preservation experience. He got by on the minimum at the other houses, but he never intended to stay at either of them. He still doesn’t need much, but he plans to live simply, not in the Dark Ages when the place was first built. And Lydia and Stiles, they will want more than that.

Chris thanks the client for the news, and contacts a few lawyers. He doubts that his father has willfully left him anything, aside from trouble—he lets the more loyal of his men know too; they’ve already been briefed on what to look for—but Gerard could be sloppy. If he’s died without making arrangements, Chris will probably be sent something by default; he won’t count on Kate being thorough enough to intercept all of it. While he doesn’t want any of it, he’ll receive whatever he’s sent. And he’ll make sure the body is buried wherever it is now.

After that, he turns back to the security planning. He doesn’t try to find out what happened to his father. It won’t tell him where Stiles and Lydia are going next, so he doesn’t care.

* * *

Chris keeps tabs on where they go. He’s always a few steps behind, but he’s not trying to catch up. It’s better if he drags, if he’s making inquiries about the same time that the rest of the underworld is. He gets a lot of rumors, but sometimes they do a contract that’s not a kill and then the parties involved don’t mind confirming to intermediaries. Once in a while they do a job for a client of his, or for someone who owes him a favor, or both, and he gets something near the facts.

There’s no real pattern to their jobs, other than certain standards about fees and client reliability. And how often. They book out at a pace that’s punishing, especially with the care and prep work that they have to be putting in. It’d make sense if they were just starting, but their kind of work, it only takes a few jobs to solidify a reputation, and they’ve already done enough for twice as many people, working years longer.

He thinks they’ll have to slow eventually, if only because the pool of clients measuring up to their needs is small. It’s cheap to kill somebody, but expensive to do it right, and honestly, there aren’t many people in the world whose lives rate that kind of cost. There are cheaper ways to deal with problems.

For now he listens, and he chooses his inquiries carefully. He’s even more careful about when he puts his resources out, and intervenes in the aftermath, waiting for chances that fit with his own business. They hadn’t told him to stop, after all.

He doesn’t think that that brings them back, but they do come. Since he moved to the country estate, they usually don’t come together. There’s no pattern to their visits that he can find, either—he plots it out once, and he averages more than it feels like, a visit every couple weeks or so. But dive into that and he may not see them for months, and then he’ll see them one after the other, Lydia and then Stiles and then Lydia, and he’ll need the next week to rest up.

Chris sees Lydia more often. He starts looking up the clothes she brings and he thinks she might sometimes stop by between fashion weeks. And maybe she likes the quiet in the country. She sits and reads in the library sometimes, and he’s not sure it’s for work. Once he catches her sketching flowers in the garden, one of his shotguns leaning on the pot next to her and the lawn covered in shards from the clay pigeons.

She ties him down and sugars the hair from him every visit. He tries it once himself, but he gets the timing wrong and burns his fingers and has to find a dermatologist to keep them from scarring. After that he switches to shaving, but since he never knows when she’s coming, he’s usually got stubble. But she doesn’t tell him to stop.

Lydia doesn’t like to have his cock in her. She does ride him once in a while, but it’s for the shock of it, to wake him up when he’s failing on her. She likes him to put his mouth on her instead, and she likes to fuck him. On her fingers at first, and then, more often, with toys that she brings with her and then leaves with him. She starts tying him up at night, after they’re done, and then she goes to sleep next to him. She used to have nightmares and he’d learned to wake her by stroking her hair. He can’t do that when he’s tied up, but one night when she goes rigid and her breathing shallows out to barely puffs, he rolls himself over and he presses their cheeks together.

She wakes up, and unties him, and tells him to get out. He goes downstairs and opens his laptop and works at the kitchen table till she shows up, fully dressed, hair styled and face made up. He left out a salad for her and she looks at it like it’s out of place, like a fish in a meat market.

Then she eats it, taking it over to the table to sit with him. “Do you think you knew us?” she asks.

“No. But I wasn’t trying,” Chris says, looking at her over the laptop. “You knew that. You worked hard to make me get to know you.”

“You know,” Lydia says, letting her fork dangle. Her voice dips, goes smoky and conspiratorial, but her eyes are clear and cool, and they don’t pretend to share anything with him. “We didn’t fake all of it.”

It…hurts, but it’s not so bad. He’s surprised. He has to breathe, wait it out. “You’re good,” Chris finally says. “Good acting doesn’t make it all up.”

She smiles at him, then puts down the fork. “It’s funny. It still hurts to think about the people your father killed.”

Lydia says that very plainly, factually. She makes armor out of the confession just by the way she doesn’t fight it, hide it, bury it, but holds it out for him to see, as much as he wants. When he flinches, the corners of her mouth tilt up in a small, cold smile.

“Not that I thought it would all go away. When Stiles and I talked about it, what we were going to do next, we weren’t thinking we’d be completely different people. That’s just schizophrenia, trying to split yourself like that, and I’ve had enough of being called crazy,” she goes on. Her salad’s just a few leaves now, and she picks one up and twirls it and then lets it float back into the bowl. “But I thought it’d get duller.”

“It doesn’t. You just feel it differently,” Chris says.

Her eyes snap to him. “You talk like you know us, and then you let us walk all over you,” she says sharply. “You know something.”

“I know that I’m not even close to you,” Chris tells her, and he’s not insulting her. He’s just trying to be honest like she’s been honest. “I know that you couldn’t make me into you however you put me together. I can break a thousand times over, Lydia, but I can’t turn into something that’s never been there to begin with.”

“Well, then what are you trying to do?” she asks him. She sits back, her eyes narrowed, but her mouth is out of that razor of a smile, and it’s not a tense flat line either. “With this…turning yourself into your family, except—”

“Except I fit better than they would have,” Chris says. “Even broken up, I work better. You didn’t need a smuggling ring, and you didn’t need someone who tried and failed to be nobody who mattered. You don’t need to love me to see that.”

Lydia considers that. “No. I don’t. So that’s the idea?”

“Something like that.” Chris shrugs, then suppresses a grimace at how that wakes aches and pains all through him. Some from his bonds, some from where she played with him. He’s wearing loose, old drawstring pants but the insides of his thighs are still chafing, itching every time the cotton moves over them, thanks to how sensitive the sugaring makes him. “I’m not a mastermind, you know. I just know what my family taught me, and what you two told me.”

She considers him a moment longer, and then she gets up and takes him back to bed. Ties him up again, but she lets him pillow his head on her belly, and lulls him to sleep with slow strokes of her hand through his head. He knows she doesn’t sleep, but she lets him rest.

* * *

Stiles, when he comes, comes in a whirlwind. Lydia’s developing a routine, slowly and unevenly, but there are recurring elements. But Stiles tries something new on Chris every single time.

He hates it when Chris is quiet. He’s talking, always talking, and he makes Chris talk back to him, and then, when Chris can’t talk, he wants a noise, any noise. He’ll do anything short of drugs, or permanent physical marks, to get it, and he always gets it. Chris can’t always remember, sometimes it’s just too much, but he tries. He does.

And then he’ll drop it all, for no reason that Chris can discern. One visit Chris spends the day tied to a wrought-iron gate in the back, far enough from the house that he can’t tell whether Stiles leaves the place. He’s spread-eagled, his cock pulled through an iron curlicue that scrapes him every time he moves, and Stiles comes by to fuck him, to stand on the other side of the gate and jerk off and then paint the come over Chris’ nipples and belly and thighs. To slap his ass, or torture his balls with clamps, or kiss him hard and long through the bars. When he finally takes Chris down, he has to carry Chris over his shoulder back to the house.

The day afterward, he brings Chris breakfast in bed and then he sits and eats with Chris, talking about mutual clients. At two-hour intervals he changes the bandages on Chris’ wrists and ankles, and treats Chris’ other injuries with the appropriate creams and balms. Eventually he lets Chris get up, and he watches Chris make lunch and asks for tips on how to build a stew, and then he disappears after that and Chris only realizes the man’s gone for good when he looks in the bedroom Stiles was using and sees the bed’s made up with new sheets.

Other visits Chris never gets out of bed, except to kneel on the floor by it with Stiles’ cock in his mouth. And after, he just crawls from bed to bathroom and then back for a few days. Stiles always leaves him whatever medical treatment he needs, and Chris can count on getting an unsolicited inquiry from his doctor the day after, but that’s all that stays the same.

He thinks Stiles is looking for something. Things change all the time but some things never come back. When they blindfold him, it’s like the world slows and everything is soft and black and numb, and no matter what Chris tells himself to do, he gets quiet and he just listens. Lydia prefers that, does it at least once every visit, but Stiles tries it and he sticks a gun in Chris’ mouth and Chris doesn’t even change his breathing, and Stiles never blocks out his sight again. Not just blindfolds—no small dark spaces, nothing like that.

Stiles ties him up a lot of different ways, but a few times he does positions where Chris has to hold still or hurt himself, arms leashed to neck, or wrists to balls, and Chris thinks about it and he finds the collars his family’s kept from their old wolf-hunting days, and he sorts through them till he finds one that’s not broken with age. Works it over with oil, restitches the buckle. The nameplate’s gone but he just rubs leather polish over the strip till the lighter spot where the plate had been disappears.

He doesn’t wear it all the time, but when he does, he puts it under his shirt-collar, since he doesn’t know when they’ll be around. Lately Lydia’s been sending him advance notice—short, hours to a day at most, but it’s notice—but Stiles still drops in unexpectedly. His neck is irritated the first few days, and he catches himself tugging at it and making his swallows shallower. But then he gets used to it. The leather gets used to it too, getting more supple, remembering it used to be skin.

Lydia ends up coming first. She looks at him, and then she raises her brow. “Your idea?”

He shrugs, watching her face and her hands. Her forehead creases, her mouth thins, and then she reaches out and takes him by the arm. She walks him through the house, then pushes him down on his knees by a chair, and sits in it so she can tip his head onto her lap. She runs her hand over the collar, assessing rather than caressing.

“Do you want me to take it off?” he asks her.

She smiles at him, thin and edged. “Do you like it?” And then, when he hesitates, she twists her fingers into his hair and pulls his head back till he’s just shy of a broken neck. “You know whether or not you do, Chris. You can sit here and tell yourself you’re just reacting, the same act all over again, but you’re playing as much as we are.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I—” he hisses as she jerks his head, the pain in his neck lancing roughly down his spine.

But she pulls him forward, not back, and then she lets him go. He slumps against her knee, breathing hard, curling his fingers into his thighs to keep from reaching for her. She doesn’t want an apology, says her cool stare. She wants an answer.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. He looks back at her. “I’m sorry.”

Lydia presses her lips together. Her shoulders twitch back, irritated, signaling that she’ll rise and leave, and then she sighs instead. “If you were more manageable, we might be bored,” she says, and that’s the end of it.

She doesn’t care for the collar but she doesn’t hate it. She tolerates it. Stiles, on the other hand, when he sees it—he stops, and then he snorts and a derisive smile comes onto his face.

“We gonna sit down and discuss your limits next?” he says, flipping his hand at Chris. “What do you think you’re doing, making this proper? You think if you dress it up, it’ll look nicer, then _be_ nicer? Fake it till you make it, and we fall in love and make this some S &M fairytale about abuse gone good?”

“No,” Chris says.

Stiles stops. He looks at Chris again, and then he gives Chris a different smile, one that’s no less derisive, but it doesn’t have that mocking edge so it’s twice as threatening. “Well, I don’t like it.”

Chris puts his hand up and begins to unbuckle it, and Stiles grabs his arm. Pulls them flush together, trapping Chris’ already rising cock against his leg, his words licking at the underside of Chris’ chin like wet flames.

“You gonna put it back after I’m gone?” he asks.

“Yes,” Chris says thickly. And then he sucks in his breath, opens up his throat a little. “Stiles, I’m sor—”

Stiles turns on his heel and walks out.

Chris breathes in, then out. He has work he could do. He hasn’t made dinner yet. But he puts his hand down, stooping till he touches the floor, and then he lowers himself to sit where he is. He looks at his hands, then strips off his suitcoat and unbuttons his shirt cuffs and pushes up his sleeves.

He looks at his scars. The ones that he had before them. The shiny round burn scar Stiles pressed into his upper arm with a smoking gun muzzle. Pushing him back when, thinking he hadn’t heard right, he’d tried to follow them out, just before Lydia had taken his emptied gun and slapped a fresh one, with that one bullet, into it.

Stiles comes back. He strides up to Chris and looks down, and disgust still flickers through his eyes when they drop to the collar. But he’s cool now; he might fidget with his sleeves and scuff his shoes but those are just jiggles of a compass needle, before it swings back to the true heading. “Lydia told me what you said, but what if we find somebody who fits better?” he asks.

“Then you find them,” Chris says. 

He’s calm too. He knows that’s abnormal—he knows everything about this is abnormal. He’s a man who knows murder and theft and blackmail are horrific, and who still falls in love with people who live and breathe that. So when Stiles leaves and he sits because if he stood he’d fall, and then Stiles comes back and talks to him about replacing him but that doesn’t matter, because Stiles is back—he knows it’s wrong. He just doesn’t feel it now.

“You’re so sure,” Stiles says, half-laughing. “You have somebody in mind?”

“No, but I know I’m not the way you want,” Chris says. He shrugs. “I know what I can do with myself, Stiles, and I’ve done what I can. But—”

“You say that, and I think you mean it. I think you’re probably even right.” Stiles puts his hands on his knees and bends till he and Chris are almost level with each other. He’s frustrated with Chris. Fascinated, and maybe even a little amused. “And you’re an asshole, Chris, and one that’s stubborn as hell. Your hands are all bloody now but you’re still the same man who pushed off his father for suburbia, and then tried to cut a deal to sic the rest of your family on him when that didn’t work out. You want things a certain way just as much as we do.”

Chris breathes and he’s shaky. He hears the challenge in Stiles’ voice and he wants to be quiet, to just lower his head and let it pass and keep Stiles here. But he knows that’s not how Stiles works. He has to say something, if he doesn’t want the man to leave.

He can’t tell lies to them, so he gives Stiles the truth. “I know. But I know what I can get, and what I never will. I don’t miss what I can’t have.”

“I think that’s true too,” Stiles says, studying him. The man’s voice drops a little but doesn’t soften. “And you know, I guess that’s what makes you different. You might not be the best, Chris, but you’re so frustrating it’s almost the same.”

He straightens up, steps forward at the same time. Stiles puts his hand on Chris’ shoulder and Chris starts to get up. Reaches for the collar again, but Stiles slaps his fingers away.

“Wear it, if you like it so much,” Stiles says, snappish again. “And deal with what it gets you.”

What it gets Chris is Stiles strapping his hands behind his back and squeezing a metal tube on his cock, and then putting a buzzing vibrator in him. Precome leaks and leaks from the top of the tube, till it’s smeared all over the dull grey metal, frosting it with wet shine, and he jerks himself over onto his belly and ruts uselessly into the bed till his legs give out and he’s collapsed in a slick of his own making, and still the vibrator plays away in him, keeping him sparked and hot. Stiles makes him drink water, shakes him awake when he starts to pass out, and then, when every muscle is unstrung and even his eyelids feel too worn out to move, Stiles turns him over and takes the cage off.

Puts his mouth on, turns up the vibrator, and Chris can’t move but something in him tears viciously, and he blacks out before it even finishes.

When he wakes up, he’s clean, the bed is clean, he’s not tied up and his limbs are arranged comfortably. His head is on Stiles’ leg, but when Stiles notices he’s conscious, the man moves him off and then pours some kind of smoothie down his throat, stopping the terrible claw of hunger that’s just begun to rear up in Chris’ gut.

“So, you know, your sister,” Stiles says. “We picked up her trail after getting your dad, and we talked about it and we think we’ll probably have to get her, too.”

“You didn’t yet?” Chris says.

Stiles pauses, and then looks genuinely rueful. “We were going to leave her off, since she actually ditched the family name and she wasn’t talking to anybody here or Gerard, but she’s calling herself Kate Argent again. And, well, she seems vengeful.”

“She is.” Chris licks at his lips and even that aches. “I don’t know over my father, but she can make up a reason.”

“Yeah, that’s what we figured too,” Stiles says. He pauses again, before putting the glass aside and reaching for Chris’ shoulder. He tugs Chris almost onto his belly, then traces his finger down the line of Chris’ tattoos. One for each visit, stretching almost to Chris’ waist now. “The thing is, Chris, sometimes we actually like you. We did even before. I mean, the original plan, we were just going to straight up kill you once we got the info we needed, but then you got all helpful, and so we figured we’d take you along for a bit, see how long that lasted. And you keep being _helpful_ and then you turn around and you do something like this—”

He flicks his finger against the collar. Chris hadn’t even noticed it was still on, till Stiles touched it, and now that he does, he realizes Stiles must have taken it off to wash him and then put it back.

“—and I don’t know if I like somebody who kills everybody he’s related to and shoots himself and then tells people he loves them, just so he doesn’t have to make the last call,” Stiles finishes. “Maybe you work for us, but still, I want somebody I can like.”

Chris looks at him. Stiles is smiling, his voice is casual, but he looks at Chris with that impersonal predator gaze.

“I’m sorry,” Chris says.

“Why?” Stiles asks him.

“Because—because you do like me, Stiles,” Chris says slowly. “You two do. And you don’t like that, and I’m sorry. I know how that feels. But I can’t help it.”

Stiles is still and hard. Then he’s not, slipping loose amusement over him like a mask. “That how you felt about us at the beginning?”

“No, not that. You were just…I felt sorry for you, at the start, and I needed somebody to do something for,” Chris says. “I meant…with me, I meant this work. Why I left, why I tried to stop. Why I didn’t want Allison in it, kept her in the dark the whole time—I didn’t want to know, Stiles. I didn’t want to know if that passed down to her.”

That gets Stiles’ attention. “I don’t think you like it now. I could be wrong, okay, but…”

He sweeps his gaze around them, at Chris’ vast, almost empty museum of a house, centerpiece of an empire they broke together, the pieces of which Chris has picked up and deliberately whittled down and reshaped and then put back together. Carefully, thoughtfully, the way you work when your hand is sure because you don’t care if it falls apart.

“I don’t like it,” Chris says. “I think that went when I shot myself. But back before that, before I left my family the first time. That’s the time I’m talking about.”

Stiles sits with him for a few minutes. He still has his hand on Chris’ back and his fingers drum softly across the tattoos.

“Sometimes I look at you, and I wish you were different,” Stiles says abruptly, taking his hand away. He gets up and takes the glass from the bedside table. “That’s what bothers me. Your dad didn’t know shit about how to do this life right. We’re better than him, and we figured it out. And we figured out, it’s no good to wish. You have to do it.”

He takes a step away, then comes back and jerks the collar from Chris’ throat. Lets it drop almost immediately, so it falls back across Chris’ shoulder, and then he leaves.

Chris curls up and shivers and he hates himself, hates that he couldn’t keep the other man yet again. But when he can get up, when he has enough strength to, he puts the collar back on. He can’t help it; it helps him. When he wears it, he remembers how he fits now. And that’s harder than it looks, because much as he tries, pieces keep slipping, they don’t quite match because he knows how to break and carve and cut, but not how to smooth himself out. 

So he just keeps picking up the pieces, and pushing them together. The collar helps him remember the shape when he puts the pieces back.


	5. Chapter 5

A lot of people let Chris know about Kate’s death. He’s a little surprised. He knew she was still alive, and he knew where she was in the sense that he made sure they wouldn’t cross paths, but he hasn’t kept up on what she’s been doing.

He looks into her now, to figure out what he’s been handed down this time, and so he finds out about the Hales before Stiles and Lydia tell him. He half-guesses that Stiles and Lydia did something to them, just because their bodies don’t turn up with Kate’s, and when the Alphas start to die, that’s when Chris starts thinking that the Hales are still alive because Stiles and Lydia are interested.

What happened to that family—they were just one of many that Gerard and Kate ruined, it just happens that they were smart enough, for a while, to drag Chris into it and so he ended up meeting them. He remembers Talia the best, because she’d seen straight through Chris’ claims and had called him out for them, for being hypocritical enough to think that sacrificing other people’s children would protect his own. She’d been right, of course, but Chris could have told her then that it wasn’t about the principles, or rightness, or even about the future. It was about surviving the battle you’re in, and if he had, maybe she would’ve understood better what kind of man she was up against in his father.

He hadn’t. And when he’d heard about the fire at their house, he hadn’t been sorry about not telling her. He’d been sorry about them, sorry that yet more people had lost out to his father, but he was never going to save them. Chris had only so much, he’d long since learned, and what he had, he had to keep for his own family. He couldn’t protect Allison but he still thought he could _save_ her.

Now Allison’s dead and it turns out three of the Hales are still alive. Peter, Chris remembers too, for the man’s backhanded plots and insinuating smile and his strange, twisted loyalty to his own family. He’d let Peter get under his skin a few times, even though he’d seen, dealt with, dismissed far cleverer people before that, and he thinks it was because sometimes Peter echoed too closely to parts of him he didn’t want. Back then, anyway.

Derek and Laura, Chris doesn’t remember. Sure, he recognizes them, he has their faces and voices in his head, and he knows all the things they would say and claim about him—and how much of that is fact—but he doesn’t remember them. He’d made a point not to get to know them at the time, because they had been children. Derek had been, at least, and Laura had been older but she’d still looked to her mother and that uncertainty had been too young. 

They’d been children, and Chris had stood back and let their mother run them straight into his father’s hands. So no, he couldn’t have gotten to know them.

* * *

 _I want you to meet Laura,_ says Lydia’s text. Then she sends him arrival and departure days, and a list of things she wants. 

_Sure_ , Chris replies.

A fresh text from her pops up right after, with a second arrival and departure day, and he realizes he’s interrupted her. Usually Lydia ends with the order list and he grimaces, then pushes away from his laptop. He gets up and goes to the window of his office, and looks out the window while he waits.

 _Stiles might be bringing Derek and Peter later on, so the above are tentative,_ Lydia sends. _They still don’t know about you._

Chris types two letters: _ok_.

That’s it. He stands by that window for ten more minutes, and when Lydia doesn’t send him anymore, he goes back to his laptop and sits down and works.

There are a couple different reasons why Lydia and Stiles might do this, and Chris does think of them. It might be a job, or revenge, or both, but the Hales don’t have the assets to pay Stiles and Lydia’s rates, from what Chris knows, and he’s never seen Stiles and Lydia take on somebody’s cause besides their own. He’s heard about them doing a favor, or playing favorites on a whim, but that’s not the same.

It might be because the Hales fit better. Chris does consider that, and it seems the most likely reason. He only really remembers Peter, but the three of them have survived this long and even ended up at the scene of Kate’s death, and that says a few things. Says that they’re better fighters than he remembers. Says that they’re better at keeping each other alive.

Says that they had enough substance that, whatever the intervening years have done to them, they could pay it or let it break and bend them, and they still were in good enough shape to be interesting to Stiles and Lydia. Chris knows that they didn’t come in with the kind of skills that his family gave him, but they probably give Stiles and Lydia more to work with and at this point, Stiles and Lydia have the time and resources to afford training.

Anyway, Chris doesn’t think it has anything to do with him, why Lydia’s bringing Laura over. He assumes it’s all to do with them.

He’s wrong, but it’s not like that’s the first time. Besides, they can’t do what they want with him, but they are learning him.

* * *

The second time he sees Laura Hale, he meets her and Lydia in his family’s Paris townhouse and it’s the first time he’s stayed in the place since he left for the country estate. Lydia and Stiles have used it in the meantime, and they’ve added to it, but mostly in the way of security. Outside of the bedrooms and a bathroom each, they haven’t done much in terms of furnishing.

“I wasn’t thinking of buying a whole museum either, but a couch and a couple armchairs would be nice. When we get to sit down, it’d be good to sit on something besides those wooden kitchen chairs,” Laura says dryly, pulling Chris by the hand into the store.

They’re an attractive couple, well-dressed, and it’s the kind of store where that gets them politely, but insistently, attended to. That kind of thing amuses Laura, Chris is learning, and she tucks her arm through his, lets her hair brush his shoulder, slips her fingers into his trouser pockets when they stand next to each other. When the salespeople compliment them, she ducks her head and then presses shy kisses to his cheek.

After they pick out a living room set, she pushes him into the bathroom and then holds onto his shoulders as he kneels, his head up her dress, and licks her out. Laura gasps and moans, riding his face, and then reaches around and wrenches his tie loose, pushes her hand into his shirt and grips at the collar beneath. Her nails sink into his neck under the leather, leaving stinging red crescent marks behind.

He has a leather sheath on his cock, one that laces up the underside like a corset. It’s thin enough that it doesn’t show through his trousers, but stiff enough to make him ache when they clean his face afterwards. He stands at the sink, Laura stands behind him, and she keeps one hand down the front of his trousers, cupping two fingers across the uncovered head of his cock, which is made extra-sensitive from how the sheath’s pushing the blood up into it.

“You’re dripping,” she says, using her other hand to wipe his mouth with a wet paper towel. “You’re going to spot yourself.”

“It won’t show,” Chris says, leaning back into her. He lips at her fingers, when they graze past the towel, and then turns his head as she mouths in behind his ear. “Should’ve thought of that, that color upholstery, it’d show _there_.”

Laura laughs and rubs at the head of his cock so he groans. “Yeah, it would, right? And she likes me without any underwear on, just dripping out. When we’re gone you can count all the stains and see how often she’s put me on the couch, how about that?”

“Fuck,” Chris grunts, almost biting the towel. He grips either side of the sink and it’s solid marble, it’s not going anywhere but he thinks for a second that he hears it cracking, he’s clenching at it so hard.

“Think about it,” Laura says, right against the tender skin behind his ear. Her breath blows up against him, then curls warmly down the side of his neck and his tie’s still pulled out, his collar’s showing and stretching as he swallows hard. “Me just sitting there, for hours, some vibrator up my cunt, tied up and waiting and getting that cushion all soaked. And where do you think you are, Chris?”

“In front of you.” His mouth is clean but she’s still dabbing at it with the towel, and he’s nuzzling into her hand, panting for it, groaning when she pulls it away. “In front, she always puts me in front, on the floor and between your legs, smelling it but—but I can’t—she’d gag me so I can’t—”

Laura slides sharply against his back, her knee slipping across the side of his, hem of her dress humping up as she grinds into his thigh, and maybe it won’t show on his trousers but he can feel her dampness, feel the slicks still left on her thighs and a new warm wetness starting to seep through her skirt. “Jesus Christ, you asshole,” she hisses. “You’re worse than my uncle.”

She jerks herself back, pulling her hand out of his trousers, and then she grabs him by the arm. He lets the tug turn him and he catches her mouth, and they kiss like they’re at war, all the way out of the bathroom.

“Forget the goddamn coffeetable,” Laura mutters, leading them out of the store and into their car. “I guess we can get that tomorrow.”

The cock sheath isn’t locked on, it just has knotted laces, and Laura pulls a knife from one of the car’s storage compartments and cuts the knot. She gets Chris’ cock up with a couple rough jerks of her hand, and then they fuck, her on top, him with his back to the backseat and his feet braced to either side of the window.

Laura’s messier than Lydia, less precise, more physical. When she fucks, she likes to press all of herself onto him, breasts and hands and mouth. She likes his cock, likes to have it in her, but she likes his hands, too. He can touch her, can cup her breasts and roll his thumbs over her nipples, and she’ll arch her back and sink her nails into his arms and then cant her hips to grind her clit along his cock as she rides it.

Chris thought he hated that. He doesn’t want to do that with Lydia or Stiles, not now. When they tie his hands so he can’t reach them, it’s a relief. And when Laura started pushing at him, he doesn’t think she understood it but she read it, she sensed it and she slid in close, curved herself at him and dared him to touch. He didn’t take her up on it and she touched him instead and then he still doesn’t know what happened but his hands ended up on her and he liked it. He still likes it.

He missed it, he remembers. Touching a woman, feeling where she goes soft and where she goes hard and lean, pressing his fingers into the tremble of her body. He’s not sure where or how he showed it, but Lydia read that in him, and she decided to do something about it. So now there’s Laura.

“You know you have furniture piled up on the basement,” Laura says, curling over him, sweaty and slack and so warm. “That we could’ve used, if it didn’t look like it was from the century where they invented that torture thing, the coffin with the spikes.”

“The iron maiden?” Chris says. His arm’s wrapped around her back. He can hold her, and she nestles into it, and for some reason it doesn’t make him flinch. He’s relaxed as she is.

“Yeah. So your furniture,” Laura says. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

“Why?” Chris says. Then, when she pushes up and frowns at him, he moves his arm so he isn’t barring her way, but he doesn’t pull his hands off. He wants to leave them on, and she lets him keep them on her hips. “They’re old, yeah. I cleared the rooms out when I inherited the place, and those things have probably been in the family for generations.”

Laura shrugs. “So you don’t even care about them, do you? So why are you still keeping them?”

“Because I don’t care about them,” Chris says. “Do you want to get rid of them?”

“Sometimes I see why they get so pissy with you,” Laura says, grimacing. She pushes herself up further, throwing her hair over her shoulder, and then she snorts, twists herself around so she’s sitting beside him. She glances back, her hand slipping to flick its fingers at his belly, and then she leans down to grab her clothes. “And I don’t know, sometimes I kind of feel for Peter, dealing with Derek. I’m not really sure that’s what Lydia had in mind for me.”

He turns over, letting her dress before he tries to get his own clothes. It’s tight in the backseat and there’s only room for one of them to go at a time, so he watches her. She’s annoyed, and confused, and she’s different about that than Lydia or Stiles. Laura likes to pick at things when she doesn’t understand them, instead of going away and figuring it out—she reminds Chris of her uncle that way.

“I don’t think you’re here to fix me,” Chris finally offers.

Laura laughs, tugging her dress straight across her shoulders. She reaches down and hooks up his shirt, and then holds it out so he can sit up and put in his arms. “No, just to text you, and fuck you some, and keep you company once in a while,” she says, kissing his cheek. “Your family’s bullshit, I’m just beyond that now.”

Chris does up half the buttons on his shirt, looking at her, while she tucks her hair into a loose ponytail, and then he stops and he leans over. He puts his chin on her shoulder and Laura breathes in sharply, and he sees a flush start up the side of her neck.

“I miss them, when they go, and it hurts like nothing you’ll ever know, because she keeps you too close for that,” he says. He isn’t playing for sympathy, he’s just telling her, and he knows she hears that in his voice because she doesn’t push him off. “You miss that kind of thing, and then you look at all the things you have but you don’t care about. And maybe you don’t care about them but you’ve gotten rid of things before and then realized you missed something.”

“I think you’re confused,” Laura says, and then she does push him off. But she twists her hand around, grabs his arm almost in the same move, and their noses brush, their mouths almost do. “You’re one way and then you’re the opposite, Chris. So get us home before you give me a headache.”

He gets dressed and he drives them back. The furniture shows up at the end of the day, and Lydia approves. She sleeps with them that night. Laura takes a pill—she doesn’t mind at all, somehow—because Lydia only ever goes to sleep around Chris, who promised her he wouldn’t come after her, or Stiles. So Chris has his hands tied to the headboard, and Lydia slots between them and falls asleep.

Chris wakes up and he needs the toilet and Lydia’s already awake again. She unhooks the cuffs but keeps them chained to each other, and sends him off to the bathroom. When he comes back, she’s sitting cross-legged, Laura’s tousled head at her hip, and she’s chewing her lip over a message on her phone.

“More money, more problems, the song goes, but it should be more people, more problems,” Lydia mutters. She looks up as he sits on the edge of the bed, his cuffed hands in his lap. “You know, you made a good call. Smuggling doesn’t help and information brokering does. But that doesn’t tell me why you still keep up the enforcement teams.”

“Because you can’t blackmail everyone,” Chris says, frowning. She should know this. “Sometimes nothing stops a person but death.”

“Sometimes things get left after you die, and they keep going. Don’t they?” Lydia says, brow rising.

He shrugs. “Yeah, so that’s another reason. You need the manpower, if you’re going to rebury something. And…and you should, if only because dead needs to stay dead, or else nothing ever works.”

Chris doesn’t know what she’s after. They talk business with him and they’re straightforward about that, not hiding or trying to shock, just laying out the relevant details for him. But when it comes to him, or their past, they’ll do it obliquely, never quite giving him context for their questions. He thought at one time that they were trying to bait him, because he’s not very direct about those topics either. Or maybe playing chicken—seeing if he’d drop it first, if that’d spur him into being what they want.

These days, after Laura, after her brother and uncle, he’s less sure about that.

“Well, I think Stiles might have something to say about it,” Lydia finally says. She puts her phone away, lip curling in disgust, and then she turns to him and her lip smooths into a small, serene smile. “Come back to bed, Chris. Laura’s cold.”

He slides up behind Laura, who shivers and turns her head further into Lydia’s hip, still deeply asleep. Lydia strokes Laura’s hair and then reaches over, taking him by the back of the neck and then tucking his face into Laura’s shoulder. Chris pushes his head up into Lydia’s hand, breathing in as her fingers dig into his scalp, and then sinks back down under her push.

“You’re not so complicated, actually,” Lydia says, leaning back against the headboard. She’s contemplative, gazing at the waning moon through the window. “And you’re not so stubborn as you make yourself out to be, Chris. But you do take a very long time.”

“Did you want to take the time?” Chris asks.

Her fingers move, putting the edges of her nails to his skin, and then they brush back over the same spot without cutting him. “Honestly, Chris, when we figured out that that’s all we needed to put into you…well, we’re here, aren’t we?” she says, and then she looks over and smiles at him.

* * *

Derek Hale goes fishing for information, still-warm gun trapped between his hand and Chris’ hip, Chris’ cock slipping out of his mouth. And Peter Hale pokes and prods and then turns around and raises the dead to slap in Chris’ face, taking Chris’ latest inheritance—one medieval farmhouse turned black site, care of the French government—and reducing it to nothing more than a showcase for his ego.

Chris never knew Derek before but he can tell where Stiles has worked over the man, smoothing that away, roughing up this, to get the casual, callous killer who wipes off a gun like he’s pulling a cock, but who leaves the blood on his collar for his uncle to tsk at while they fuck each other. And Peter, Chris can see Stiles’ fingerprints too, but where Derek’s been cut and shaved, he’s been eased into it, a lighter touch that’s made a real weapon out of his amused, ever-simmering malcontent. They’re both better for Stiles than Chris is.

“And you’re really not jealous?” Laura asks him, her head lolling on his stomach, Chris’ hand prints on her hips and upper arms, her teeth marks fading from his thigh.

He’s just ordered his family’s house to be blown up. One of them. He’s got plenty of others, enough disused and unwanted assets to fill ten museums. He _has_ had to throw out things from time to time; building code violations may seem like nothing next to the sources of his revenue, but there’s no reason to break laws unrelated to his business and then have to cover up that. But he was restless after sending the order and Laura knew it.

Lydia knew it. She made sure she’d be away, and in the meantime Laura and he fucked till he worked out all that jumpy energy, till that burned away and he was just left with the exhausted ache of an overstrained body again. It didn’t take very long, much to his surprise. This has been waiting for so long, and now that things have finally tipped…it’s just the end of a very long sigh, that’s what it feels like.

So he’s ready, he supposes. It makes sense. He didn’t know Stiles and Lydia before but he does now, he can say that. And if he knows them, he knows what he doesn’t need anymore.

“No, I’m not,” Chris finally tells Laura. He pushes his head down from the pillow, bending up the leg she’s not using, his hand dragging out of her hair and down her spine to half-cup a shoulderblade. “What Stiles is looking to have around him, I knew I didn’t have that in me. So it’d be a waste of time, being jealous.”

“Sometimes I can’t make up my mind whether you sound New Age or you sound like a coldblooded son of a bitch,” Laura says. She turns over, her chin grooving into his belly, running one hand up to his raised knee and then bringing it back down to finger his bullet scar. “Derek and I keep taking turns being jealous of each other, over goddamned Peter of all people. And you know, the funny thing, I don’t think Peter’s ever really registered that? You’d think he would, he should be smug as hell but he’s not.”

Chris shrugs. “Well, he’s said he loves both of you, so I hear. Love screws you up.”

Laura hums, amused and a little irritated, and then she pulls herself up and over him. Her breasts plump up against his chest, rolling across some half-healed rope burns on him, over nipples still tender from clamps on her; he shifts and sucks in his breath, and she shudders. She grins and fingers a burn, and then slides her arm up his breastbone so that she can stroke the side of his jaw. “He’s fucked both of us, sure. He and me get along, and he’s in love with my little brother, and that works for us. But so what if I said you love me?”

“You don—” Chris starts, and then he hears her, and not what he was expecting her to say. He shakes his head. “I don’t love you.”

“But I think you’re starting to,” Laura says, looking down at him. Her fingertip draws curlicues down the line of his jaw, then moves back to run over his earrings. “I think Peter’s okay with it now. I’m getting weird vibes from Derek, but I think that’s more whatever’s the latest thing with him and Peter.”

Chris looks at her, and then he moves his head back, arching up his neck. Laura rises with it, keeping their eyes locked, then laughs and swings her legs up so she’s straddling him. She pinches one of his nipples, moving her hand up with his hissing flinch, and then lets go to bend over him, her arms on either side of his head, her hair falling to close them in.

“You like me,” he says.

Her eyes are very wide, and under the dark veil of her hair, they seem to glow rather than gleam, what little light there is sinking in instead of skimming over. “Yeah,” she says. “I might even love you, if you keep going like this. You’re getting more fun.”

“Fun?” Chris says, his brows rising.

“You’re blowing up stuff, that’s always fun,” Laura says. She lifts herself a few inches, then tosses the hair on one side back over her shoulder. “I didn’t get you, when Lydia first brought me over. I still don’t get you, not most of you. But when you put it this way, I think I get why it’s attractive. Don’t freak out, Chris, it’s not like you’re transforming into a butterfly or anything. It’s just—the view’s a little different.”

“And you like the view,” he says. He tips his chin up a little more, so that his collar digs at the gorge of his throat. Not tight enough to choke but tight enough to catch his breath.

She grins. “Yeah,” she says, as she reaches behind herself, draws up his half-risen cock and presses its head against her clit. “Yeah, I do. And you know what? I think you do, too.”

* * *

The business shifts over time, like anything else. Information brokering will never go out of fashion, but what kinds of information, the way they have to be handled, the way senders and receivers deal with each other, that all changes.

Chris started out just trading, counting only on payment to determine who took what, but passive stops being neutral and so he starts picking who gets the information, starts putting out teams to get sources instead of waiting for them to find him. He’s not as active as he could be—that would make him a party to a cause, not just a broker, and he doesn’t care who wins, just that they don’t force him to their side—but he’s more active. He has to put a few more people on payroll, reposition himself in the eyes of the various governments and institutions who think they have a say in the underworld.

Stiles and Lydia come by, he thinks to let him know they approve, and instead they kill somebody. They’ve done that before, taken contracts while they’re visiting him—or in Stiles’ case, just gone out looking for a challenge to fill downtime—and they’ve had him take along Derek or Laura, depending on which of them it was. But this kill, it’s not a contract of theirs, it’s not practice for one of the Hales, it’s not a joyride. It’s someone who’d wanted to put a bounty out on Chris’ head.

He’s used to that. Some bounties don’t need to be touched; they’re worth more as marks of a certain status in their world, compared to how much trouble it is to work around them. Some need to be dealt with immediately. This one, it’s the second type and he hadn’t known about it.

“I wouldn’t take it as a failure of your system,” Stiles says, untying Chris’ wrists from the bar. “It wasn’t official yet. You would’ve heard with plenty of time to do something.”

“Besides, Chris? Do you think this is the first time we’ve jumped in?” Lydia says. She’s already washed up and come back from the bathroom in a robe and a negligee, curled up next to Chris and tapping at her tablet. “You don’t really think you were the only one playing clean-up, do you?”

Stiles bends down as Chris twists gingerly over onto his side. His fingers flutter against Chris’ nipple and Chris groans, slumping over as a hot wave of pain spreads out from the bruised flesh. Smiling, Stiles sweeps his hand up Chris’ chest, over his shoulder and then closes it around the back of Chris’ neck, pulling up Chris’ head so they’re looking at each other. “Flattered?”

“Confused,” Chris says after a moment.

“Yeah, you would be,” Stiles snorts. He tugs Chris’ head back a little more, till Chris’ neck muscles are shuddering with pain, and then he lets go. He squats on the bed and looks down at Chris. Flicks his fingers at Chris’ jaw, then pivots around and flops down against the headboard. “You would think we’d just toss you out there, after all the work we’ve put in.”

The bed shakes under him and Lydia makes a small, displeased noise, then reaches over Chris to hold out a tube of antiseptic ointment to Stiles. “I don’t think it means you’re happy with me,” Chris says, watching Stiles unscrew the top. “I don’t think it means I fit any better.”

“Like I said,” Lydia sighs. “A long time, that’s what you are.”

She puts the tablet down and goes back to the bathroom, getting warm damp towels and bandages, and she and Stiles clean Chris up. It’s just them for now. He’s sure they have the Hales somewhere nearby—maybe even downstairs; they caught up with Chris in an upstairs bedroom—but they haven’t mentioned them once.

It doesn’t feel like they’re trying to play on what they used to be, when they were sweet and tempting him with their wounds. He realizes that with a start that has both of them looking sharply at him, and he hisses, dropping his eyes.

Stiles reaches for his jaw, and Chris lifts that and puts it into the man’s hand. A flicker of amusement goes across Stiles’ face, not a whole wash like Chris would expect. Instead Stiles is cool, assessing. 

“Yeah, Derek and Peter, and I guess Laura—” Stiles nods to Lydia “—they’re a lot easier to work with. I mean, they actually _give_ , and they look good like that, man, Chris, they look so good I kind of get why people fuck themselves over for stupid things like a crush. But you’re not about how you fit. Seriously, we’re not samurai, we’re not after the perfect cut.”

“Well, when we’re not on a job,” Lydia amends. She smooths down a piece of tape, making sure the gauze pad won’t peel off Chris’ hip, and then she sits back. Slips her hands under his head and lifts it and rests it on her knee, then moves one hand back to trace over their tattoos on his back. “And you never were that. You were always personal.”

“You, man, _you_ ,” Stiles says, laughing, leaning down again. He rubs his thumb along Chris’ jaw, then tips in for a soft, dragging kiss that feels like the slice of a knife over Chris’ throat. “Out of all your family, I never would’ve thought. We picked you because we thought you were broken up the most, and you are, but man, Chris, you made that an art. Just _won’t_ , will you. Whatever we do, you just won’t. You know how many people get to do that to us and live?”

“For that matter, how many people we’ve adjusted for?” Lydia says dryly. Her weight shifts and her knees graze along his spine as she stretches out, still petting his back. “But it’s worth the lesson. Sometimes you _can_ just wait it out.”

“Just tell me something, okay. And I’m just curious here, because I’ve gone back and forth because you go back and forth, and at this point I’m almost thinking that whatever you say, you really do mean it, because right then you feel it, but…you do this because you like yourself this way?” Stiles kisses Chris again, harder, his fingers clamping around Chris’ jaw just as Lydia closes her hands around Chris’ buttocks, squeezing him up into Stiles’ mouth. “Or just because it’s easier.”

“I didn’t—” he gasps. He’s prickling all over, pain twisted up with heat and he’s come too much, he’s dry and empty but he shudders and he feels it in his cock, in the useless clench of his balls. He can’t answer like this.

They see that, and they back off. Still against him, Stiles mouthing at his jaw, Lydia smoothing her fingers up and down his newly-hairless, oversensitive thighs, lingering where the cuffs bit in, but they give him enough room to breathe.

“Didn’t think of it like that,” Chris finally says. He leans into one, then the other. “Just…you asked back then, why I’d shoot myself there, not in the head.”

“And you said, you can leave but I love you,” Stiles says. He doesn’t grimace, doesn’t flare up with irritation, just rubs the ball of his thumb into the soft spot under Chris’ chin, between the jawbones. He’s just wanting an answer.

“It didn’t work,” Chris says. He shrugs and Lydia moves her hands up and catches his shoulders, and rolls them forward, her thumbs sliding up his nape, either side of his spine, as she licks between them. “I knew the moment I said it, it didn’t work. And then I woke up, and I knew you were still around, if you’d taken me to London. So I had to make it work. Don’t have to fit to work—I couldn’t do that anyway.”

Stiles snorts. “You can’t, yeah, but also, you won’t try. You won’t _leave_ , as you put it.”

“So you can,” Chris says. He breathes out carefully, part of him still wondering whether they will, and then he sees they’re staying, for now, and he smiles. “I started breaking long before you ever got to me. You just made sure of it.”

“But we could’ve put you together,” Lydia murmurs. She moves her mouth slowly along the back of his neck, wet, warm. Soft as suffocation. “We had to work around you instead, but we could’ve gone a different way, couldn’t we, Chris?”

Chris closes his eyes. He can’t get hard again, but they can still get worked up. They are, Stiles’ cock rising along the inside of Chris’ thigh, Lydia’s negligee pushing up his back so he can feel her damp groin pressing into his buttocks. “I broke,” he says. “You can’t do anything about that now. Putting me together—wouldn’t have undone that. So why.”

“I don’t know, the challenge, the fun. Maybe even a little nostalgia. You were kind of interesting the way you were. You didn’t need the whole collapse, you know, you just needed a couple adjustments,” Stiles says. “But yeah, we’re seeing your point now. No idea what you might’ve been like, but the way you are, Chris? The way you’re going?”

“We’ll buy it,” Lydia says, before her teeth sink into him.

They have to clean him up again, after they’re done. He’s barely conscious, slipping to not at all, and when he wakes up, they’re gone but Laura is curled around him, tucking the sheets over them, her fingers circling the ligature marks on his wrist. She’s got a vibrator in her, he can hear the buzz as it goes off every so often, stirring her awake enough to whimper and rub her face against his back. His collar’s back on—Stiles took it off earlier—and he’s blindfolded, and when he moves his head he feels a tug at the back of his neck and hears the clink of a chain.

He’s calm in the dark, just a little curious, in that half-awake way, and when he sorts it out he falls back asleep.


	6. Epilogue

“Derek thinks you’re just around for the skills, but hey, it’s Derek, that’s what you get with him,” Stiles says. “Peter, I think he might not be so stupid, but he has a hard time getting past how you just lie there. I guess he’s a kinetic learner or something like that, can’t process without the movement. Good thing he makes it look so good.”

“Laura’s learning,” Lydia says, and then she sighs. “But so quick to jump to conclusions. It does make me wonder how they managed on their own for so long.”

Chris shrugs, putting their dinners in front of them. “They just started,” he points out. “You had me for longer. Started earlier.”

“Well, anyway, they’re something else, that’s the whole point of them,” Stiles says. He looks at Chris and then he pinches off a piece of his roll and holds his arm out at his side, down so his hand’s a few inches from his hip. “And yeah, you were first.”

Chris comes around and gets on his knees, and he takes the bread from Stiles’ fingers with his mouth. Chews and swallows it slowly, so the constriction of his collar won’t make him choke.

They don’t tattoo him anymore, when they come. They’re no longer marking time and he’s stopped looking for that from them. He still loves them; they still don’t love him. But he has Laura for that, with her casual affection and her quicksilver humors, sharp as he wants and close as he needs. And they aren’t so frustrated with him—so wary, he’s come to realize, careful with what they can’t immediately grasp—and he thinks he works better for them, with them. He’s learning to handle Derek and Peter as well, and between all of them he doubts that they’ll be facing an outside challenge any time soon. They’re stable.

He’s not happy like this. Happy is a word that stopped existing for him when he learned that his daughter had died. But he’s made something, he thinks, with all the pieces that he’s been left with. He made it, and it wasn’t to spite them but it was in spite of them, even if they eventually came around to it. It’s the only thing he’s ever wanted to do that way. 

So, Chris thinks, he’s done now.


End file.
